The Mladeč 3 infant

Abstract

During the course of excavations between 1881 and 1922, caves at the western end of the town of Mladeč yielded skeletal material from several children. Six of these individuals included cranial remains, of which only two survive today: Mladeč 40, excavated between 1903 and 1911, and until recently in the possession of the Knies family, and Mladeč 3, excavated in 1882 and taken back to Vienna by Szombathy for study and curation (Szombathy, 1925). It has been established, with some certainty, that all of the Mladeč children were excavated from early to middle Central European Aurignacian deposits (Valoch, 1968). In addition to Mladeč 3 and 40 described in this volume (see Frayer et al., this volume; and chap. 8, plate XVII), Mladeč 46, comprised of numerous portions of a skeleton approximately 10 years of age at the time of death (Knies, 1905), was recovered in 1904. Three additional juveniles, Mladeč 37, 44, and 45 were unearthed in 1922 (Smith, 1982; Jelinek, 1976). Unfortunately, Mladeč 37, 44, 45 and 46, together with numerous other invaluable late Pleistocene hominid specimens, were housed at the museum at Mikulov when it was destroyed by fire in 1945 during the final days of World War II in Europe. As no casts were made of these lost Mladeč children, and their unpublished documentation perished with them, they must forever remain essentially unknown. Their loss is particularly great, considering that so few immature remains have been recovered from the early Aurignacian. Since 1882, Mladeč 3 has been curated at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria. As part of the Mladeč sample, the specimen provides important insight into the development of the adult cranial morphology within the important early to middle Aurignacian Mladeč population. In the broader sense, however, Mladeč 3 is presently the only known example of an infant from the Central European Aurignacian and thus provides a rare snapshot of early growth and development in a population overlapping temporally with Neandertals, potentially offering valuable clues regarding the similarities and differences in ontogenetic patterning in these groups. This is of considerable interest as, in attempting to understand the evolutionary transitions of late Upper Pleistocene peoples, our ability to recognize the significance of complex phenotypic changes in the fossil record may well depend upon our ability to interpret them within a detailed life history context. Szombathy's 1925 publication of numerous Mladeč skeletal remains included a competent but cursory description of Mladeč 3. The present study is intended to supplement his work by analyzing the Mladeč 3 infant with the benefit of numerous comparative data available from the many Upper Pleistocene juveniles discovered since 1925 and within the context of analytical frameworks developed beginning in the latter half of the 20th Century by investigators of paleoanthropological ontogeny (Vlček, 1969; Tillier, 1982; 1983a; 1983b; 1987; 1988; 1999; Heim, 1982; Minugh-Purvis, 1988; 1993; 1998; 2000; Minugh-Purvis et al., 2000; Minugh-Purvis and McNamara, 2002; Coqueugniot, 1999; 2000; Zilhao and Trinkaus, 2002; Akazawa and Muhesen, 2003; Thompson et al. 2003; Anton, 2002; and many others). © 2006 Springer-Verlag/Wien. All rights are reserved.