Hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought
Up until now, the earliest evidence pointing to early human activity in the Philippines dated back to 67,000 years ago, when archaeologists found a single foot bone in Callao Cave in the Philippines’ northern Luzon.
A new study now suggests that early humans have been on the archipelago country even earlier — thousands of centuries earlier.
Researches revealed in the journal Nature on Wednesday, May 2, that an early human may have had a meal on the island some 700,000 years ago. Archaeologists unearthed dozens of abandoned artifacts next to a butchered rhinoceros carcass in Luzon’s Cagayan Valley province of Kalinga.
The 57 artifacts were made out to be tools, and included 49 knife-life flakes and two possible hammers. Along with the crisscross cut marks on the rhinoceros’ ankles and ribs, researches said the findings showed “clear signs of butchery.” Much to researchers’ delight, 75 percent of the rhinoceros was complete.
Also found were the more than 400 skeletal remains attributed to Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtle, monitor lizard, and the now extinct elephant or mammoth-like stegodon — all of which were perhaps tasty to the early humans.
But it was the age of the remains that made the discovery especially astounding. Using electron-spin resonance methods, researchers found that the clay-rich bone bed in which the artifacts originated, dated back to between 631,000 and 777,000 years. They say the best estimate goes back to around 709,000 years — long before the known origin of today’s modern Homo sapiens species.
“This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages,” said the study’s authors.
The Pleistocene period is also often referred to as the last Ice Age.
“It was surprising to find such an old peopling of the Philippines,” Thomas Ingicco, the study’s lead author and archaeologist with France’s National Museum of Natural History, told the National Geographic which partially funded the research.
Burgeoning interest in South Pacific
Researchers aren’t yet sure exactly who the early inhabitants were, but the fact that such primitive artifacts have been found in islands along the South Pacific have further brought curiosity as to how early humans were able to cross the open ocean and arrive in the first place.
Previous findings in the South Pacific region were in Indonesia when in 2004, Australian and Indonesian researchers discovered bones of the species Homo floresiensis — miniature humans or “hobbits” — in a Flores island cave east of Bali.
A National Geographic news report described them as “tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits” and “lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia 18,000 years ago.”
In 2016, stone tools were found on the island of Sulawesi, north of Flores. The tools were dated back about 66,000 years before the arrival of the first anatomically modern humans — at least 118,000 years ago.
The 2010 foot bone discovery in the Philippines’ Callao Cave, which was led by a team at the University of the Philippines Diliman, was concluded to have dated 67,000 years ago and had the measurements between that of modern humans and H. floresiensis.
Researchers behind the study said that the sole presence on the isolated island of Luzon indicated the ability of humans during the Late Pleistocene to make open ocean crossings.
In regards to the latest Kalinga study, researchers say it is likely that they had gone over at least one sea barrier to reach Luzon. The most likely points, according to the team, are Borneo through Palawan to the west, or China through Taiwan to the north.
While researchers are wary of suggesting that boats were used (the years of crossing are way earlier than any current evidence of people navigating or building boats), the possibility isn’t being completely ruled out. The 2010 discovery, did lead some experts to believe ancient rafts may have been used and lost beneath the sea.
Other theories propose that the animals and their butchers may have unintentionally floated to Luzon on aquatic plants or mud masses that were torn off by storms, as mentioned by the National Geographic. Regional tsunamis may have also played a role.
As new questions emerge, researchers are promising that their focus in the area is just the beginning.
“There’s a lot of focus again in the islands of South East Asia because they are places where you find natural experiments in hominin evolution. That’s what makes Flores unique, and now Luzon is another place we can start looking for fossil evidence,” said study coauthor Gerrit van den Bergh, a sedimentologist at the University of Wollongong.
