Transverse openings on some cervical vertebrae of children buried in the mid-Upper Paleolithic site of Sungir (Sungir 2 and 3) are unclosed and doubled. Non-closure is observed in both children on C1, in one (Sungir 3) also on C4 and C5. In child Sungir 2, there was a doubling of holes on C4 and C6, and in child Sungir 3 - on C4 - C6. Such a combination is very rare in modern people. The relationship of these features with the variants of blood vessels is unclear, so it is difficult to give them any interpretation. Key words: vertebrae, transverse foramina, vertebral artery, Upper Paleolithic, paleopathology, paleoanthropology. Introduction When examining the vertebrae of children's skeletons 2 and 3 from the burial site of the middle pore of the Upper Paleolithic Sungir, a number of anomalies of the transverse openings of several cervical vertebrae were found. Since the transverse openings of at least the first six cervical vertebrae (C1 - C6) normally form around the vertebral arteries during ontogenesis and are thus associated with the vital arterial blood supply to the brain, their variability deserves attention. The lateral parts of some transverse openings on the cervical vertebrae were not closed, and in several cases there are two openings on each side instead of one. The latter anomaly was noted in the literature (Anderson, 1968; Taitz, Nathan, Arensburg, 1978; Jovanovic, 1990; Das, Suri, Kapur, 2005), but without taking into account its unilateral or bilateral occurrence and the degree of formation of the entire cervical spine. Material and methods Sungir 2 and 3. The skeletons of children come from a double burial site excavated in 1969 at the Sungir site near Vladimir (Bader, 1978, 1998). They were lying with their skulls facing each other. According to the results of direct radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry, the skeletons are 26-30 thousand years old (calibrated dates are 34-31 thousand years ago) [Kuzmin et al., 2004; Dobrovolskaya, R ... Read more