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By HOWIE G. SEVERINO, GMANews.TV
08/01/2010 | 09:07 PM

Move over, Tabon Man. Callao Man is here.

Evidence has emerged that the islands comprising

the Philippines could have been inhabited by
humans more than a dozen millennia before the
so-called Tabon Man of Palawan, long thought to
be the archipelago¶s earliest human remains.

A team of archaeologists led by Dr. Armand

Mijares of the University of the Philippines-
Diliman has confirmed that a foot bone they
discovered in Callao Cave in Cagayan province
was at least 67,000 years old. Tabon Man¶s Cave was a The foot bone discovered in Callao
remains were a relatively young 50,000 years mere 61 millimeters or 2.4 inches.Photo
courtesy of Dr. Armand Mijares.
old.

³So far this could be the earliest human fossil found in the Asia-Pacific region. The presence of humans in
Luzon shows these early humans already possessed knowledge of seacraft-making in this early period,"
Mijares told GMANews.TV in an exclusive interview conducted by email in between archaeological digs.

Mijares acknowledged being ³shocked and elated" at the discovery, adding that it was something people in
his field dream of. ³I am a Pleistocene Archaeologist and our efforts are meant to unravel the deep past," he
said.

His team¶s findings were recently published in the scholarly journal Human Evolution, but the actual
discovery of the bone occurred in 2007. However, it was not clear then just how old the fossil was. Mijares
said they were able to approximate its age through a method called ³uranium-series dating."

The primary theory is that Callao Man, or his ancestors, reached Luzon from what is now Indonesia by raft
at a time when experts did not think human beings were capable of traveling long distances by sea.

However, the scientists also found signs that Callao Man might not have been fully human, but only a
species akin to modern man.
According to Dr. Victor Paz, a UP colleague of Mijares who was not part of the excavation, the bone could be
evidence of human ³speciation" taking place in Luzon. (Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new
biological species arise.)

³If speciation did take place in the region and more evidence comes out of older modern human remains, it
may seriously challenge current conventions on the spread of modern humans to our region," Paz said.

Based on the single bone, it is not clear that Callao Man was male. But they do know that its physical size
was similar to the modern Negrito, or Aytas of Luzon. The bone was the third metatarsal of the foot, thus is
referred to scientifically as Callao MT3.

Archaeologist Armand Mijares stands in excavation site in Callao Cave where he and his team discovered the
earliest human fossil in the Philippines, and perhaps in all of the Asia-Pacific. Photo courtesy of Armand
Mijares.
The human bone was found in the town of Peñablanca, Cagayan in an excavation site where Mijares had
started digging four years before.

³We were initially frustrated that during the excavation we were only finding animal remains. But when my
colleague Dr. Phil Piper, our team¶s zoo-archaeologist, was looking at the finds, he said to me, 'Mandy, this
is a human bone,'" Mijares said. ³When we verified that it is a human bone, I knew that we discovered
something very important."

The presence of the remains of butchered animals in the same layer of sediment, but no stone tools, raises
interesting questions about how Callao Man killed them.
³We can only speculate that they were using different tools. From our initial analysis of the cut marks on the
animal bones, they could have used organic tools such as bamboo which is ubiquitous in the region," Mijares
said.

Where there is a single human bone there could be more, so Mijares and his team intend to continue digging.
Additional discoveries of remains of Callao Man could be enough to show with more certainty that he was of
an earlier species than homo sapiens, which could mean that the first modern humans in the archipelago did
not sail here but evolved here. r Howie Severino, KBK, GMANews.TV

Discovery of 67,000 year old remains puts RP in global

archaeological map
(philstar.com) Updated August 04, 2010 10:43 PM

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