Last year, while a Penn team of archaeologists was working in Morocco, members uncovered a treasure beyond anything they'd imagined - a skeleton of a child from 108,000 years ago. They don't know what killed him at about age 8, but his remains are believed to be one of the most complete ever found of this period.
The skeleton promises to open a window into a pivotal time in human evolution when Neanderthals still ruled Europe, and Africans were inventing art and symbolic thought.
One of the earliest sites where people left evidence of artwork and symbolism is in Morocco, where a team led by Penn Museum's Harold Dibble found the child.
One of Dibble's students was the first to notice a piece of bone the size of a quarter, said Dibble, who is a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. To everyone's surprise, the bone was part of a remarkably complete skull and upper body of a child that died 108,000 years ago, as shown by various dating techniques.
The work was funded by National Geographic, whose cable channel will present a special program at 8 p.m. Thursday based on the finding, titled The World's Oldest Child.
From analyzing the teeth, Dibble's team estimated he or she was 6 to 8 years old. Dibble bestowed the name Bouchra, meaning good news in Arabic. It's a feminine name, but he has since decided it's more likely to have been a boy.
Dibble's team has yet to release the skull to the scientific community, nor have team members published peer-reviewed papers. But they say it's remarkably complete. Experts are eager to see it, hoping for a look back into a pivotal period.
In that earlier time, 108,000 years ago, modern Homo sapiens - people who looked like us - had emerged in Africa and begun to spread to the Middle East. Neanderthals populated parts of Eurasia. Africa was thought to be a patchwork of so-called modern Homo sapiens and somewhat different-looking "archaic humans."
"This will fit into the global debate on how and where and when modern humans arose," Dibble said.
"It joins a very small sample of hominid remains in Africa from that period," said archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University. "We don't know a lot about human populations at that time."
The young age of the child is also of scientific interest, he said. "As far as I know, this is the first juvenile from that crucial time period."
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How can this be? A K A Stone claims the earth/man is only 6,000 years old.
BobCeleste on elPee doesn't buy this news item either.
