Tools recently found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years, and could upend what we know about human ancestry. The stone tools were found abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in and there are cuts on the rhino’s ribs and ankle, clear signs that someone probably tried to harvest and eat the animal’s bone marrow and strip the carcass of meat. But the question is, who? The bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, reports National Geographic, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. This is hundreds of thousands of years before the known origin of our species occupied the island.
“It was surprising to find such an old peopling of the Philippines,” says lead study author Thomas Ingicco, an archaeologist with France’s National Museum of Natural History to Nat Geo.
Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but who made them? https://t.co/c57frOTMGa
— National Geographic (@NatGeo) May 2, 2018
When researchers discover what archaic cousin of ours butchered the rhino, it will most likely cause a stir among people studying the human story in the South Pacific—especially those wondering how they got to the Philippines in the first place.
“I think it’s pretty spectacular,” said Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, to Nat Geo. “While there had been claims for early hominins in places like the Philippines, there wasn’t any good evidence until now.”
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