After decades of digging up prehistoric tools, archaeologist Harold Dibble from the University of Pennsylvania uncovered a rare skull in a Moroccan Cave, the find of a lifetime.
As Dribble's team investigated, Naked Science, a documentary program on the National Geographic Channel, followed the team for an episode they called The World's Oldest Child.
Coming into the find, researchers had no idea what species it came from, the age of the bones, or even how old the person was when they died — but they knew the find could be a big hint about how modern humans evolved.
When they found the bones, the skull was crushed into hundreds of pieces, so the team undertook major reconstructive efforts to get to know this ancient human.
Harold Dibble spent three decades digging up prehistoric stone tools before finding the human skull in Smuggler’s cave, in Temara, Morocco.
The World's Oldest Child.
Using the quartz in the soil, the researchers found that the skull is between 108,000 and 110,000 years old, from the same era in which modern human culture emerged.
The World's Oldest Child.
They don't know what species this skull belongs to — many types of ancient humans have evolved and gone extinct over the last four million years.
The World's Oldest Child.
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