(CNN) About 709,000 years ago, someone butchered a rhinoceros using stone tools on the Philippine island of Luzon. That may not seem remarkable -- except that humans weren't supposed to be in the Philippines so long ago.

Before this discovery, the earliest indicator that early humans, or hominins, were even on those islands had been a single foot bone from 67,000 years ago, uncovered in the Callao Cave on Luzon. That's quite a time jump.

Research says that the new findings push back the date for humans inhabiting the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature also says that this securely dated evidence pushes back the date for humans living in the wider South East Asian islands region.

Researchers came close to figuring out that Luzon may have been inhabited by early humans when stone tools and the fossils of large animals were discovered there in the 1950s. But they weren't able to securely date those findings to the Middle Pleistocene, which spans 126,000 to 781,000 years ago.

But recent excavations in the Kalinga province of northern Luzon uncovered 57 stone tools and more than 400 bones of animals like monitor lizard, Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtles and stegodons, a now-extinct animal in the same family as elephants and mammoths.

The biggest find was a 75% complete skeleton of a rhinoceros that was clearly butchered, with 13 of its bones displaying cut marks and areas where bone was struck to release marrow.

All of the remains were dated to 709,000 years ago using electron-spin resonance methods, which can date material in a way that radiocarbon dating can't. These methods can be applied to such things as tooth enamel and rocks that had been heated, like quartz found in sediment.

The Kalinga archaeological site on the Philippine island of Luzon.

The discovery is important for a multitude of reasons, said study author Thomas Ingicco, associate professor at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

"First is the very old age of this site which multiplies by ten the formerly known early presence of Hominins in the Philippines," Ingicco wrote in an email.

"Second is the evidence for colonization of an ever-isolated island in The Philippines by the early Middle Pleistocene and therefore most likely by a hominin species other than Homo sapiens."

Although there is no direct fossil evidence to suggest who these early humans might have been, the "Kalinga toolmakers" represent a new area of interest and research.

"The butchery marks were a very good surprise," Ingicco said. "I only can think of two sites where you have evidences of butchery activities, one is the famous site of Choukoutien in China and the other is Ngebung in the Sangiran Dome of Java, Indonesia. So we actually know very little about these early Middle Pleistocene hominins' behaviour in Southeast Asia."

The finding adds to another intriguing area of continuing research that concerns the Callao Cave on Luzon. The previously discovered 67,000-year-old foot bone found in that cave appears to have come from an individual who had a form of dwarfism.

This is similar to the discovery of fossil evidence suggesting "hobbits" on the Indonesian island of Flores.

In 2016, two studies published in Nature described a partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children, dating to around 700,000 years ago. The fossils show how the hobbits' regular-sized ancestors "rapidly" shrank to about 3.2 feet high. University of Wollongong Centre for Archaeological Science senior fellow Gerrit van den Bergh, who also participated in the Kalinga study, was lead author of the Flores research.

"The morphology of the fossil teeth also suggests that this human lineage represents a dwarfed descendant of early Homo erectus that somehow got marooned on the island of Flores," Yousuke Kaifu of Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science said of the 2016 studies.

The new Luzon evidence "might be mimicking what we know now on Flores Island, meaning an early colonization of an isolated island followed by the diminution in body size and speciation of this remote hominin population," Ingicco said. "Luzon Island might have been the place for similar endemic evolution of hominins into dwarfism just like what happened on Flores Island. There is a huge time gap between Kalinga and Callao archaeological evidences with a lots of questions in between."

These findings are like puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together yet.

"At Kalinga we have tools and butchery activities, and at Callao they have hominin remains and some butchery marks as well but no tools," Ingicco said. "Comparing the two sites is not easy at the moment."

How did the early humans reach these islands in the first place? Islands like Flores and Luzon are more than 1,700 miles apart, although the map would have looked much different 700,000 years ago.

It is not believed that early humans were capable of building watercraft. But it can't be ruled out completely, Ingicco said.

"Considering evidence of sea-crossing during the Middle Pleistocene is increasing in number, such a hypothesis cannot currently be rejected."

What about the animals?

Although fossils of large mammals were found, none of them belongs to carnivores -- which are not known for having good long-distance swimming skills, Ingicco said. But other large mammals are.

Small animals like rats, tortoises and lizards have been found to float on vegetation to reach islands. That scenario is likely here, according to the study.

Inclement weather, like typhoons, can also create natural rafts out of vegetation capable of carrying hominins and animals.

"Colonization of the islands could have been possible thanks to natural rafts such as floating mangroves that typhoons occasionally break off the coast," Ingicco said. "These floating islands would have come with animals and possibly hominins on them. Such natural rafts are quite well documented for historical periods and it is therefore a likely way of colonizing Luzon Island during the mid-Pleistocene by hominins."

The site is excavated for a month each year. The next excavation is planned for this summer.

The researchers hope that more excavations will help to answer the questions prompted by their latest findings.

"One is who made the stone tools and butchered the rhino," Ingicco said. "To answer this we have to continue excavating and hope to be lucky enough to find a Hominin fossil of some sort.

"The other question is the origin of the dispersion. Did they come from the North as our team suspect or did they come from the West as some other archaeologists suspect? Comparing the early Middle Pleistocene fauna of the Philippines with what is known by the same age in China and in Indonesia will surely help to answer to this question."</s>PARIS: Were the early humans roaming East Asia more than half-a-million years ago clever enough to build sea-faring watercraft and curious enough to cross a vast expanse of open sea?

This and other questions arise from the discovery in the Philippines of a butchered rhinoceros skeleton and the stone tools probably used to carve away its meat, researchers said Wednesday.

The find pushes back the arrival of the first homo species on the island chain ten-fold to 700,000 years ago, they reported in the journal Nature.

Earlier archeological clues from Luzon island—tools at one site, pre-historic animals remains at another—hinted at the presence of primitive human species, echoing the way Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis probably populated the Indonesian archipelago during roughly the same period.

But until now, the earliest confirmed evidence of hominins—the scientific term used to group modern and early humans—in the Philippines came from a single, 67,000-year old foot bone unearthed in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

“We had the extraordinary luck to find a nearly complete, disarticulated rhinoceros,” said Thomas Ingicco, a paleoanthropologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study.

Analysis of the bones from the extinct species—Rhinoceros philippinensis—left no doubt “that it showed ridges left by tools,” he told Agence France-Presse.

Some of the cut marks were made while removing flesh, while others came from specialized tools designed to remove nourishing—and no doubt delicious—marrow.

Ingicco and his colleagues also uncovered the skeletal remains of other potentially tasty critters, including brown deer, monitor lizards, freshwater turtles and stegodons, extinct mammals combining elephant and mammoth features.

“We know that some species of human ate this rhino,” said Ingicco. “But we don’t know if they killed if first, or found the carcass.”

All told, the Kalinga site in northern Luzon’s Cagayan Valley yielded more than 400 bones and several dozen knapped—or chipped—tools, including 49 knife-like flakes and two hammers.

“This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonialization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years,” the authors concluded.

Several dating techniques applies to the rhino remains determined its age at between 631,000 and 777,000 years, putting it in a period known as the Pleistocene.

With no direct trace of the humans who butchered the animals, researchers could only speculate on who they were and how they got there.

Homo erectus—known to have wandered to present-day China and Southeast Asia up to million years ago—is one candidate.

It is also possible that the butchers of Kalinga had already evolved into a distinct sub-species, as likely happened to the “hobbit” of Flores, diminutive humans named for the Indonesian island where they were first found.

As for how “Kalinga Man” made it across what is today 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) of open ocean between Luzon and mainland Asia, the authors doubt they fashioned a raft or other sea-worthy vessel.

“The colonialization could have happened ‘accidentally’ after a tsunami ripped up the coastline and created a temporary land bridge, a rare but documented phenomenon,” said Ingicco. AFP</s>Prior to the new find, the oldest human fossils found in the Philippines were estimated to be about 67,000-years-old.

The recent discovery of a rhinoceros skeleton in the northern Philippine province of Kalinga suggests that early humans “colonized” the Philippines about 600,000 years earlier than what previous archaeological finds had suggested.

In a study published earlier this week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by Thomas Ingicco of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris initially described a find that was made more than six decades ago, where archaeologists found stone tools and megafauna remains in multiple Southeast Asian islands, including the Philippine island of Luzon. At that time, the theory that early humans were also present in those areas were dismissed as “hypothetical,” due to the lack of corroborating on-site fossils and artifacts.

The new research, however, looked at a more recent series of discoveries at Kalinga, a province located in northern Luzon’s Cagayan Valley, where close to 60 stone tools were linked to a near-intact skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, a now-extinct species. The researchers found signs of “clear butchery” in the rhino skeleton and other animal skeletons found in the area, but what stood out as interesting was how electro-spin resonance dating techniques revealed the finds to be about 777,000 to 631,000 years old, with the rhino tooth possibly being about 709,000 years old.

This suggests that early humans were in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years earlier than once believed. As noted by a report from Philippine publication InterAksyon, the oldest known human fossils found in the Philippines prior to the new discovery were found in Callao Cave in Cagayan in 2010, and were estimated to be about 67,000 years old.

According to Popular Mechanics, the researchers concluded that the rhino was butchered by humans because the tools found at the Kalinga site were the type of tools that early humans were known to use. Furthermore, the marks found on the rhino were too large to have been made by smaller, carnivorous animals, and looked like the kind of cuts that would have been made by human tools. There were also marks on the rhino’s skeleton that suggested it was struck by a human attacker, and no proof that its muddy habitat would have contributed to such severe bruising.

“The natural marks present at the surface of the bones were observed and described and are clearly different from the ones we interpreted as cutting marks,” Ingicco said in a statement.

While it still isn’t clear what early human species had lived in the Philippines at that time and butchered the rhino carcass, Popular Mechanics suggests that it might have been Homo erectus, a species that thrived in Asia and went extinct about 140,000 years ago.

The bigger mystery, however, might be how early humans were able to arrive on Philippine soil at a time when the islands were only accessible by boat. The researchers believe that it’s possible they dispersed “over at least one sea barrier” to arrive in Luzon, with the most likely routes being Borneo through the western island of Palawan, or from China through Taiwan, which was still connected to mainland Asia at that time in Earth’s history.</s>The discovery of stone tools near the skeleton of a long-extinct rhinoceros has pushed back evidence for hominin settlement in the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years – long before the presence of Homo sapiens.

In a paper in the journal Nature, archaeologists led by Thomas Ingicco of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, detail the results of recent excavations at a site called Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon.

The team unearthed 57 stone tools, including flakes and possible hammer stones, in the vicinity of fossil bones and teeth from several different species, including the elephant-like stegodon, brown deer, turtles and monitor lizards. Most prominent, however, was an almost complete but dismembered skeleton of an extinct rhino, Rhinoceros philippinensis, showing clear signs of butchery.

Using a dating method known as electron-spin resonance, applied to tooth enamel and quartz, the finds were all dated to between 777,000 and 631,000 years ago.

Although the presence of ancient human ancestors in the Philippines has been hypothesised for decades, until now the oldest firm evidence of hominin occupation was a single metatarsal bone recorded in 2010 and dated to just 66,000 years ago. The bone, also found in northern Luzon, was identified as belonging to a “small bodied” Homo sapiens.

In the light of the new findings, Ingicco and colleagues suggest that this classification be revisited. The bone may indeed be from a comparatively recent migratory wave of Homo sapiens, they say, but may also be a direct descendent of the Kalinga tool makers.

As to which hominin species made the stone tools and butchered the rhino, the researchers say there is in insufficient evidence to make a determination, but nominate Homo erectus or Denisovans as possibilities.

They also raise the possibility that the ancestors of the Kalinga community may have arrived from across the sea, implying that they possessed the skills and knowledge to make simple water craft. Such a hypothesis, they concede, “still seems too farfetched to suggest”, however, in light of increasing evidence of overseas dispersal, it “cannot currently be rejected”.</s>A now-extinct rhinoceros was on the menu for early humans living on the island of Luzon.

Early humans called the Philippines home as far back as 700,000 years ago — and it appears they had an appetite for rhinoceros, according to newly discovered fossils.

Hundreds of stone tools and animal bones, including the best part of a rhino skeleton showing signs of butchering, were unearthed on the island of Luzon.

Published in the journal Nature today, they push the date of human occupation in the archipelago back hundreds of thousands of years.

Precisely who these rhino-eating colonisers were remains a mystery, said study co-author Gert van den Bergh, a palaeontologist at the University of Wollongong, but there's little chance they were of our species, Homo sapiens.

"This remains speculative because we don't have fossils yet, but the dates pre-date modern humans," he said.

Even without fossils of the toolmakers themselves, the work fits in with evidence of early humans on nearby South-East Asian islands of Flores — home of Homo floresiensis or the Hobbit — and Sulawesi, according to Gilbert Price, a palaeontologist at the University of Queensland who was not involved with the study.

"The original story for human evolution was very basic, that maybe there was one single migration into places like South-East Asia, but it's becoming so much more complicated now," Dr Price said.

The new fossil haul isn't the first to be found on Luzon: a US team found animal bones and stone tools back in the 1950s.

From these, palaeontologists suspected humans colonised the Philippines back in the Middle Pleistocene, between around 780,000 and 120,000 years ago.

But without accurate dating, they couldn't be sure.

So the firmest earliest date for the human occupation in the Philippines was pegged at around 67,000 years ago, thanks to a foot bone belonging to a Homo species found in a cave in Luzon's north.

In 2013, a team of palaeontologists including Dr van den Bergh, knowing that fossils had been found in the area before, started excavating in a valley in the neighbouring Kalinga province.

"For the first couple of weeks, we didn't see much," Dr van den Bergh said.

Three-quarters, in fact — the most intact skeleton found of the now-extinct Rhinoceros philippinensis.

Intriguingly, 13 of its bones showed clear cut marks. Two leg bones looked like they had been smashed — one was completely shattered — presumably to get at the marrow inside.

The team also found other animal remains alongside stone tools, including an extinct elephant called the stegodon, deer and monitor lizards.

To find out how old their finds were, the researchers enlisted the help of labs to deduce the age of the sediment surrounding the artefacts, as well as directly dating a rhino tooth.

Volcanic minerals gave a maximum age of 1 million years. The tooth and sediment grains turned up dates of around 700,000 years, plus or minus 70,000.

Taken together, the researchers wrote, "it follows that the rhinoceros skeleton was buried by a mudflow" at least 631,000 years ago.

Who butchered the rhino and how did they get there?

Given Homo sapiens has only been around for a few hundred thousand years, the most likely Luzon-dweller is Homo erectus, according to Dr van den Bergh.

Unfortunately, without fossilised bones belonging to the mystery rhino-eaters, there's no way to identify them.

Their tools were a standard run-of-the-mill style, produced by many Homo species around the world.

Ancient DNA isn't a viable route either. The heat and humidity of the tropics degrade it quickly, Dr van den Bergh said.

So the team is continuing to excavate and hopefully find remains of those elusive toolmakers.

The work not only shows that humans were around a lot earlier than thought, and probably migrated in waves rather than in one big hit, but it also has interesting implications about how they got there, Dr Price said.

During past millennia, various ice ages dropped sea levels, so it may have been possible to walk to some islands of the Philippines — but not Luzon, which is surrounded by deep water.

One method of "accidental dispersal" is being picked up and washed across by a tsunami.

"You can't say these early people took purposeful sea voyages on boats or anything like that — there's no evidence for that at all," Dr Price said.

"But you think about the other animals that were around at the time, like the rhinoceros, freshwater turtles and deer, they probably were washed across too.

"So these accidental dispersals that sent over rhinoceros may have sent humans across at the same time."</s>Ancient rhino bones that shows signs of butchering suggest early humans colonised the Philippines as early as 709,000 years ago.

The near-complete rhinoceros skeleton was found alongside nearly 60 ancient stone tools by scientists excavating a site on the island of Luzon.

The discovery could push back our estimates for when hominins first arrived in the Philippines by almost 650,000 years.

The discovery has left scientists baffled as tho who these ancient humans were and how they crossed the deep seas to reach Southeast Asia.

Experts suggest the ancient hominids likely arrived on the islands accidentally after sailing from Africa aboard crude watercraft, but they have no proof of this.

The scientists, from France's National Museum of Natural History in Paris, found more than 400 ancient animal bones in Luzon's Cagayan Valley.

The majority of these bones made up a nearly three-quarters complete rhinoceros skeleton that showed signs of butchering.

Marks on the remains were linked to a set of 57 knapped stone tools found at a nearby site.

Thirteen of the rhino's bones have cut marks and two show evidence they were smacked against rocks to release their nutritious marrow.

Researchers also uncovered the remains of brown deer, monitor lizards, freshwater turtles and stegodons - an extinct mammal similar to elephants and mammoths.

The authors date the remains to around 709,000 years ago, providing the earliest direct evidence yet of early human activity in the Philippines.

Stone tools and the remains of mysterious large animals were discovered in separate research at Cagayan Valley in the 1950s.

The finds hinted that the Philippine island may have been colonised by early humans any time between 781,000 and 126,000 years ago.

But for the past 60 years scientists have struggled to find reliably dated evidence of this early settlement.

Until now, the oldest definitive evidence of hominins in the Philippines came from a single foot bone, found in the Sierra Madre mountains, dated to 67,000 years ago.

The exact species of the stone tools’ owners remains a mystery.

The hominins who made them could have been early humans or a group of human-like ancestors such as Neanderthals or Denisovans.

But according to the researchers, the most likely culprits were early humans, meaning groups had reached the Philippines by the early Middle Pleistocene - long before modern humans.

This adds another sea-crossing to the question of whether early hominin toolmakers were unexpectedly capable of building simple watercraft.

Study lead author Dr Thomas Ingicco suggested ancient humans and their Hominin cousins were capable of travelling long distances accidentially on crude boats.

He compared early man's travel to the Philippines to journeys known to have been taken between continents by ancient species of animal on driftwood.

Dr Ingicco told MailOnline: 'Our findings pushes back the colonisation of the Philippine Islands by more than 600,000 years.

'It provides further evidence that overseas dispersal, either accidental or deliberate (but most likely accidental) happened several times not only for faunas but also for Hominins.'

The Philippine islands were populated by modern humans when the Austronesians crossed over from farming villages in southern China or Taiwan.

The Austronesians are a range of aborigine and ethnic groups who speak the Austronesian family of languages.

These include the Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous populations in Malaysia, East Timor, Philippines, Indonesia, Burnei, Polynesia, New Zealand and Hawaii.

They are thought to have begun spreading through the islands of Southeast Asia up to 10,000 years ago, using traditional canoe vessels.

There are several theories for their migration through the islands but Austronesian people are thought to have reached Polynesia by around 1,000BC.</s>The discovery of 709,000 year-old evidence of human activity in a cave in Kalinga province has revived the discussion on who were the first inhabitants of the Philippine islands.

The National Museum proudly announced the discovery, billing it as the product of a collaborative archaeological effort helmed by researchers from different countries and institutions.

The study was completed in 2017 and the findings have just been released.

The findings on the archeological site, which include rare fossilized remains of the now-extinct Rhinoceros philippinensis and paleolithic butchery tools, have been published in a journal.

What has baffled the scientific community is that the uncovered site points to human activity predating the previous record holder by more than six hundred thousand years.

Prior to the discovery in Kalinga, the 67,000 year-old human fossils found inside Callao Cave in Cagayan last 2010 were regarded as the oldest recorded evidence of human activity in the Philippines.

Before “Callao Man” came “Tabon Man,” fossilized remains dated more than 20,000 years old, found in the cave system in Tabon, Palawan.

Who were the first Filipinos?

The mystery of who could have stepped on the Philippine islands so early in the history of man has drawn the curiosity of the public.

One user shared a theory that he believes goes against what has been taught at most schools: early migration to the Philippines proceeded downward from the north.

Another expressed pride in the impossibility that present-day Filipinos were descendants of an ancient race of dwellers.

Some countered the lack of evidence pointing to this hypothesis, suggesting that the present-day Filipinos may still likely be the descendants of Malay and Indochine dwellers from more recent centuries.

One user on Twitter proposed the idea that the culprit behind the prehistoric butchery scene may be an ancestor of modern-day homo sapiens: homo floresiensis, the hobbit-sized dwellers of Flores Island in Indonesia.

National Geographic, in its article on the discovery, says that apart from homo floresiensis, the culprits could be either the denisovans, an extinct human species from Siberia, or homo erectus from the Southeast Asian region.

Much of the history of the Philippines before the coming of the Spanish in the 16th century remains a mystery. As such, the Philippines has relied on archaeological discoveries from recent years to get a picture of our past.

In 2009, replicas of the balangay — ancient ships used by seafarers from years ago dated as early as 320AD were built and tested for travel. The balangay, excavated in the ’70s revealed ancient Filipinos’ seafaring ways.

The Manunggul Jar discovered in Palawan in the 1960’s meanwhile revealed ancient Filipinos’ early craftsmanship and belief in life after death. The ancient burial jar was discovered in the same cave in Palawan where Tabon Man was discovered.
The fossilized remains of a rhinoceros are found in the Philippines, with cut marks suggesting it was butchered with stone tools. The remains, dated to 709,000 years old by electron spin resonance, suggest a human presence earlier than expected in Southeast Asia.