The skeleton found in Hourglass Cave was not intact.

It was partial and disarticulated — the bones were separated from each other, no longer in the anatomical positions they would have occupied in a living body, scattered or displaced by the various processes that affect buried or surface-lying bone over thousands of years.

Disarticulation is normal in skeletal remains that have not been deliberately interred in a formal burial context.

When a body decomposes on a surface or in a shallow situation without the soil compression that burial provides, the ligaments and other soft-tissue connections between bones break down, and the bones gradually separate and migrate — moved by gravity, by water, by animals that disturb the remains, by the freeze-thaw cycles that affect surface sediments in high-altitude environments.