i'm going to suspend disbelief around the evidence, and wonder if it upholds the idea of neanderthals worshipping bears, in the first place. there's quite a bit of reason to expect early hominids to have had some kind of perceived spiritual relationship with wild bears, whatever one thinks of the arrangement of the bone fragments.

i've previously pointed to lions as the perfect representation of the word monster, but for humans living in more northern climates, the best example of a monster would clearly be a bear. like humans, bears demonstrate a large amount of bipedalism, to the point that they seem vaguely hominid. if i didn't know what a bear was, and i saw it coming at me, i might wonder if it was some kind of zombie apocalypse or something. further, i would imagine that any species of hominid in a bear's range would have experienced a large amount of predation at the hands of those bears until relatively recently, meaning living humans may very well have had memories of having their children or other family members eaten by these monsters that roamed around them.

my understanding is that humans eventually developed some very specific rituals around the killing of bears; there appears to have been a procedure that involved puncturing their lungs with arrows, to make sure they were really dead. this suggests that early hominids may have ultimately seen bears as dangerous competitors for the niche of head omnivore, rather than as superiors. one wonders if any observed ritual behaviour around the bears may have been to disturb their spirits, in an attempt to try to stop them from returning.

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-bear/