A team of international researchers including University of Wollongong archaeologist Dr Gerrit ‘Gert’ van den Berg have found evidence of modern humans in Southeast Asia (Philippines) hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
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Dr van den Berg is a co-author a new paper published in Nature, which points to new archaeological evidence showing that humans were living in the Philippines by 709,000 years ago.
Along with an almost complete rhinoceros skeleton, showing clear signs of having been butchered, the researchers unearthed 57 stone tools at an excavation at Kalinga on Luzon, the largest and most northerly island in the Philippines.
The find radically changes our understanding of hominin colonisation of the Philippines; the earliest evidence of hominins in the area prior to this research was a small foot bone found in nearby Callao Cave and dated to 67,000 years ago.
The paper’s authors argue that the find suggests the dispersal of premodern hominins through the region took place several times, and that the Philippines may have played a central role.
Dr van den Bergh, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, said it was most likely that these early humans spread through Island South East Asia from north to south – with Luzon as one of the stepping stones – following the ocean currents south and eventually reaching Flores to give rise to the ancestral population that led to Homo floresiensis (commonly known as the ‘Hobbit’).
“Our hypothesis is that the ‘Hobbit’ ancestors came from the north, rather than travelling eastward through Java and Bali,” he said.
Dr van den Bergh, who is a palaeontologist as well as a sedimentologist, believes the first human colonisers of the Philippines likely arrived by accident.
“After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami people were picked out of the sea 60 kilometres from the coast a week or so late. They survived for eight days just by drinking rainwater. Something similar could have happened in the distant past,” he said.
Dr van den Bergh, from UOW’s Centre for Archaeological Science, said the discovery is likely to lead to efforts to find even earlier archaeological evidence as well as to fill in the blanks between then and now.
“On Flores, we’re pretty certain they arrived about 1 million years ago based on stone tool evidence, but we don't know when hominins first arrived on Luzon. Now we can go looking in older strata and see if we can find more artefacts, or even better, fossil evidence,” he said.
‘Earliest known hominin activity in the Philippines by 709 thousand years ago’ is published in prestigious science journal Nature.
Agron Latifi
Wollongong born and bred. I love reporting about the Illawarra region and have been doing it for more than 20 years. I've moved into sport recently after covering the education round for the last five plus years for the Illawarra Mercury. It's been a great pleasure.
Wollongong born and bred. I love reporting about the Illawarra region and have been doing it for more than 20 years. I've moved into sport recently after covering the education round for the last five plus years for the Illawarra Mercury. It's been a great pleasure.
