In search of similar sites, Ingicco and Dutch biologist John de Vos went to Kalinga, a site in northern Luzon with a reputation for yielding ancient bones. Why Is This Volcano in the Philippines Extremely Dangerous? “It's really, really exciting-it's now becoming increasingly clear that ancient forms of hominins were able to make significant deep-sea crossings,” says Adam Brumm, a paleoanthropologist at Griffith University who studies H. As National Geographic reported at the time, the Sulawesi tools date to at least 118,000 years ago, or some 60,000 years before the first anatomically modern humans arrived. In 2016, researchers also found stone tools on Sulawesi, an island north of Flores. In 2004, researchers unveiled Homo floresiensis, which lived on the isolated island of Flores for hundreds of thousands of years. Several of the habitable islands across the South Pacific have long been hemmed off by swaths of open ocean, so it was thought that humans' ancient cousins couldn't have made it to them without knowing how to sail.īut as the saying goes, life finds a way. “While there had been claims for early hominins in places like the Philippines, there wasn't any good evidence until now.” Dating With Confidence “I think it's pretty spectacular,” says Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved in the work. While the researchers don't know which archaic cousin of ours butchered the rhino, the find will likely cause a stir among people studying the human story in the South Pacific-especially those wondering how early hominins got to the Philippines in the first place. “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. The next-earliest evidence of Philippine hominins comes from Luzon's Callao Cave, in the form of a 67,000-year-old foot bone. The research- partially funded by the National Geographic Society-pushes back occupation of the Philippines to before the known origin of our species, Homo sapiens. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino's ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.īut the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers' best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Two of the rhino's limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years-but researchers aren’t sure who made them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |