The Philippines found itself at the center of international scientific attention last week when paleonthologists at France’s National Museum of Natural History announced the discovery of evidence that as early as 700,000 years ago, early humans lived in Kalinga, in the Cordillera region of Luzon.
Previously, the earliest evidence of human life in the Philippines had been a human foot bone found in the Sierra Madre mountains, determined to be 67,000 years old. Now, according to Thomas Ingicco, lead author of the study in France, a rhinoceros bone had been found in Kalinga, showing definite cut marks left by tools used by humans to remove meat and marrow to use as food.
For decades, the world’s scientists had speculated that the earliest humans first appeared in Africa about 150,000 years ago, then started to migrate to other parts of the world around 60,000 years ago. Recent research in Israel, however, found a Homo sapiens jawbone dated to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago – pushing human evolution back by several hundred thousand years.
The recent discovery in the Cordilleras of Luzon is in line with these discoveries indicating that humans have been on this earth much earlier than believed. And that some of these early humans found their way to Luzon, as evidenced y the discovery of the rhinoceros bone with marks made by human tools. The rhino bone was dated between 631,000 and 777,000 years ago, during a period known as the Pleistocene.
There are no direct traces of the humans who left the marks and how they got to Luzon from the Asian mainland. One speculation is that there may have been a land bridge at one time, connecting our island to the mainland. The French authors of the study said they doubt those early humans could have come by raft or some other seaworthy vessel.
Those who are familiar with our people’s ancient sea tradition are not as ready to discard that possibility. For the early Filipinos were known to have wandered in their balangays all over the seas in this part of the world. They were the forefathers of the hundreds of thousands of Filipino seamen who now man the ships of many nations around the world.
We look forward to further discoveries and studies of the land and the people that we now call the Philippines. We are only now beginning to learn about what it was like in these islands before the Spaniards and the Americans. Now we are pushing further back into prehistoric times when humans first came to be and we find that we were part of that gigantic era of human evolution.
