Archeologists found stone tools on the island of Luzon in the Philippines from an ancestor 700,000-years older than modern humans. The tools were used to butcher a rhinoceros by a currently unknown ancestor.
Until now, the oldest fossil evidence of humans found in the Philippines were 67,000-years old coming from Callao Cave on the same island. Now, this new find changes the timeline of our ancestors’ diaspora to southeastern Asian islands.
The team uncovered 57 stone tools and roughly 400 bones total, belonging to an assortment of animals, including lizards, turtles, deer, stegodons, and rhinoceroses.
Previously, archeologists only had evidence of human migration to southeastern Pacific islands in the Indonesian archipelago dating back 118,000 years ago. Now that timeline has been pushed back more than half a million years.
