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."
