Magdalenian Girl

Magdalenian Girl is the common name for a skeleton of an early modern human dating from 13,000 to 11,000 BCE, in the Magdalenian period. The remains were discovered in 1911 in the Dordogne region of southwestern France in a limestone cave known as the Cap Blanc rock shelter. The find was made when a workman drove a pickaxe into the cliff face in the rock shelter, shattering the skull. It is the most complete Upper Paleolithic skeleton in Northern Europe.

When Magdalenian Girl was acquired in 1926 for the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois by Henry Field, then curator of Physical Anthropology, it was hailed as one of the most significant acquisitions the museum ever made. On the first day the precious specimen was exhibited, tens of thousands of visitors flocked to the museum to see it.

There was some speculation as to her sex but it was ultimately decided by the size and shape of her pelvic bones, which is a major indicator of sex in skeletons.

There is still some debate about the age of Magdalenian Girl. For years, the individual was thought to be a young girl, because her wisdom teeth had not yet advanced, but new analysis indicates that her wisdom teeth were impacted, and that she was actually 25 to 35 years old when she died. This is the oldest recorded case of impacted wisdom teeth. Other evidence that indicated her age were fully fused epiphyses and degenerative wear on her vertebrae. According to Dr. Robert D. Martin, primatologist and Field Museum provost, along with Dr. William Pestle, Field Museum Collection Manager, Drs. Michael Colvard and Richard Jurevic of the College of Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Magdalenian Girl is most likely significantly older than 18–21 years.

However, some dentists disagree that Magdalenian Girl was an adult. An x-ray of her jaw shows that the roots of her wisdom teeth never formed and would mean that Magdalenian Girl is a subadult after all.

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