Lost, destroyed or misidentified postcranial specimens from Mladeč

Abstract

Along with the postcranial material covered in the previous chapter, there are 23 other specimens described or mentioned by Szombathy which have been lost, were destroyed at Mikulov or were misidentified. Despite the limited details we have for these specimens, they provide some additional information about skeletal variation at the site and potential associations of certain skeletal parts into individuals. In some cases we can only list the elements since Szombathy published neither data nor photographs for many of the more fragmentary specimens. However, he provided some information, if sketchy, for some postcrania. For example, the strongly curved femoral shafts, catalogued by us as Mladec 78, were proposed by Szombathy to be associated with the Mladec 5 cranium in the side cave. If so, this would indicate that several whole cadavers were likely deposited in the both caves, as we argued in previous chapters. Likewise, Szombathy described postcranial remains associated with the child vault (lost) from the Quarry Cave. Thus, there is some evidence from the Quarry and Main Cave that more than just parts of cadavers were deposited in these burial sites. If so, for a variety of reasons, not all the bones were preserved or collected. Besides the lost details about the nature of the burial sites in the Main and Quarry Caves, the missing skeletal parts described here would have been extremely helpful in sorting out some of the taphonomic details from the Main and Quarry Caves. Here, we list the additional specimens and describe them from Szombathy's text or, in some cases, his plates and tables. We have included comparative data for Neandertal and the Skhul/Qafzeh samples. For these data, we used male measurements as complied from our personal dataset. In fact, for this material, most of the specimens for which Szombahy provided measurements, have very large dimensions and we consider them to be most likely male. © 2006 Springer-Verlag/Wien. All rights are reserved.