![]() ![]() “The butchery marks were a very good surprise,” Ingicco said. “Second is the evidence for colonization of an ever-isolated island in The Philippines by the early Middle Pleistocene and therefore most likely by a hominin species other than Homo sapiens.”Īlthough there is no direct fossil evidence to suggest who these early humans might have been, the “Kalinga toolmakers” represent a new area of interest and research. ![]() “First is the very old age of this site which multiplies by ten the formerly known early presence of Hominins in the Philippines,” Ingicco wrote in an email. The discovery is important for a multitude of reasons, said study author Thomas Ingicco, associate professor at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. ![]() Thomas Ingicco/Mission Marche aux Philippines The Kalinga archaeological site on the Philippine island of Luzon. These methods can be applied to such things as tooth enamel and rocks that had been heated, like quartz found in sediment. The biggest find was a 75% complete skeleton of a rhinoceros that was clearly butchered, with 13 of its bones displaying cut marks and areas where bone was struck to release marrow.Īll of the remains were dated to 709,000 years ago using electron-spin resonance methods, which can date material in a way that radiocarbon dating can’t. But they weren’t able to securely date those findings to the Middle Pleistocene, which spans 126,000 to 781,000 years ago.īut recent excavations in the Kalinga province of northern Luzon uncovered 57 stone tools and more than 400 bones of animals like monitor lizard, Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtles and stegodons, a now-extinct animal in the same family as elephants and mammoths. Researchers came close to figuring out that Luzon may have been inhabited by early humans when stone tools and the fossils of large animals were discovered there in the 1950s. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature also says that this securely dated evidence pushes back the date for humans living in the wider South East Asian islands region. Research says that the new findings push back the date for humans inhabiting the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years. That may not seem remarkable – except that humans weren’t supposed to be in the Philippines so long ago.īefore this discovery, the earliest indicator that early humans, or hominins, were even on those islands had been a single foot bone from 67,000 years ago, uncovered in the Callao Cave on Luzon. About 709,000 years ago, someone butchered a rhinoceros using stone tools on the Philippine island of Luzon. ![]()
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