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