Best Posts in Thread: Rhino Remains Suggest Humans Were in the Philippines 709,000 Years Ago

Rye83 · May 3, 2018

Multiple, stone tools and a butchered rhino push back the date of early human presence in the Philippines by 67,000 years. Since the discovery in 2007 of Callao Man — represented by a Homo sapiens foot bone excavated at Callao Cave — humans were thought to have first lived in the Philippines about 67,000 years ago.

Now that number needs to be multiplied nearly 11 times, as an international team of researchers has just discovered strong evidence that early humans were in the Philippines by at least 709,000 years ago. The evidence, reported in the journal Nature, consists of 57 stone tools and an almost complete disarticulated skeleton of a butchered rhinoceros.

"There are obviously two questions to answer at present," lead author Thomas Ingicco of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris told Seeker. "One is who made the stone tools and butchered the rhino."

"The other question is the origin of the dispersion," he added, referring to how the toolmakers and rhino wound up in a bucolic part of the Philippines.

The new findings, as well as prior research, provide clues.

First, there is the location of the artifacts and animal bones, which also include the remains of brown deer, monitor lizards, freshwater turtles, and stegodons — members of an extinct genus similar to elephants and mammoths. All were found at a site called Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon Island, Philippines.

"By 700,000 years ago, Homo erectus seems to have been present everywhere in Asia," Ingicco said. "We have fossils from China and Java in Indonesia, and some are much older than the Kalinga site as we have evidence as early as 1.8 million years ago in those places."

Butchered Rhino Remains Suggest Humans Lived in the Philippines 709,000 Years Ago
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Cerne · May 5, 2018

Yeah, I read this. Felt sorry for the Rhino, an endangered species too. Was there no Jolibee open at the time?

Fascinating find, can’t find the link, but a further read suggests a species similar to the ‘Hobbits’ found in Indonesia.

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Best Posts in Thread: Rhino Remains Suggest Humans Were in the Philippines 709,000 Years Ago

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