The child’s remains may have been brought to the cave deliberately by the community that survived her.

All of these are possibilities that the evidence cannot distinguish.

We do not know the circumstances of the child’s death.

A child of one to one and a half years old, in any community and at any time in history, faces specific vulnerabilities: infectious disease, accidents, nutritional insufficiency, developmental disorders.

But none of these causes of death can be identified from a single tooth without specific pathological evidence — evidence that is not present in the available material.

We do not know what community the child was part of, how large that community was, or what its social organization looked like.