À propos des vestiges humains du Magdalénien du Sud-Ouest de la France : l’enfant inédit de l’abri Lafaye (Tarn et Garonne, France)

Graves in Magdalenian context are very rare randomly five burials dating from Middle Magdalenian are known ; among them the burial of “l’Abri Lafaye” (Bruniquel, Tarn-et-Garonne) is the only one that concerns an immature individual. It is also the only known double burial, since the child is associated with an adult female individual. It is therefore the only child found in funerary context for this culture. “L’Abri Lafaye” was discovered and excavated in the 1860s by Victor Brun (Curator of the Museum of Montauban).
The burial was lately attributed to the Magdalenian, therefore the main research focused on the adult individual and the child was not studied, Lost and forgotten, the immature individual was only rediscovered in the 1990s by Dominique Henry-Gambier and Edmée Ladier in the attic of the Museum of Natural History of Montauban. An inventory as well as a description of the remains of the child, supplemented by an estimation of the age at death and health status, permit to make metric and morphological comparisons with a small sample of immature individuals from the Upper Paleolithic and more recent children, from a medieval necropolis (Cognac-Saint-Martin).
The results confirm the modern like anatomy of the child and bring unpublished data for an individual aged between [1-4] years for the Magdalenian period. Yet, the poor state of conservation prevents any discussion of the causes of death or the ties of kinship with the adult.