Evidence suggests humans lived in the Philippines 700,000 years ago

A new study poses the possibility that humans had roamed Philippines hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

The earliest indicator of human life in the Philippines was the homo sapiens Callao Man, a 67,000-year-old fossilized human remains found in Callao Caves in Cagayan in 2007, but a research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature “pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years.”

Among the finds recovered from recent excavations at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon were 57 stone tools linked to an almost complete skeleton of a now-extinct Rhinoceros philippinensis which shows clear butchery to 13 of its bones.

Using electron-spin resonance methods, archeologists found that the fossils came from a clay-rich bone bed that dates back between 777 and 631 thousand years ago, ten times earlier than the previously known presence of hominin activity in the Philippines.

The research read, “This evidence… suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages.”

It added, “The Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna, but also of archaic hominins.”

The content was written for Philippine Canadian Inquirer’s Daily News Round-Up, May 5, 2018 edition