A new study poses the possibility that humans had roamed Philippines hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The research read, \u201cThis evidence\u2026 suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages.\u201d<\/p>\n
It added, \u201cThe Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna, but also of archaic hominins.\u201d<\/p>\n
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