According to BBC News the fossil of a 100,000-year-old giant dromedary has been unearthed by a Swiss-Syrian team of archaeologists near the village of El Kowm in the central part Syria.

"This is a big discovery, a revolution in science," said Jean-Marie Le Tensorer, a prehistory professor at the University of Basel.

Professor Jean-Marie Le Tensorer continued by saying that according to the newfound remains, the ancient animal seemed to have been twice the size of a modern dromedary;

"The dromedary's shoulders stood three metres high and it was around four metres tall; as big as a giraffe or an elephant. Nobody knew that such a species had existed and it was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago."

Professor Le Tensorer, who has been excavating at the desert site in Kowm since 1999, said the first large bones were found some years ago but were only confirmed as belonging to a dromedary after more bones from several parts of the same animal were recently discovered.

The big species has been found as far back as 150,000 years ago. But fossils from other species of camel have been unearthed at the site dating to one million years ago.

Human remains from the same period as the giant dromedary have also been discovered at the site.

"The bone is that of a Homo sapiens, or modern man, but the tooth is extremely archaic, similar to that of a Neanderthal. We don't know yet what it is exactly. Do we have a very old Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal?" said Professor Le Tensorer.

The El Kwom site, first surveyed in the 1960's and where evidence of a million-year-old human settlement has been found, is considered a "reference for early prehistory in the Near East," according to a Basel University research paper.