



A new discovery of stone tools and other evidence has revealed that hominins - our pre-human relatives - were in South East Asia hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought.







Found in the Philippines, the 57 stone tools and an almost complete rhinoceros skeleton showing signs of having been butchered, date back 709,000 years. Previously, the earliest evidence for hominin habitation in the region, a river floodplain on the northern island of Luzon, had been a small foot bone found in Callao Cave. It's only 67,000 years old. The tools found consist of 49 sharp-edge stone flakes , six cores - the stones from which the flakes are hammered - and two possible hammer stones. In addition, the site yielded a collection of skeletons: a stegodon , brown deer, freshwater turtle, and monitor lizard. The rhinoceros skeleton was very interesting. Several of the bones had cut marks consistent with butchering, and the humerus bones seemed to have been hit with a hammer stone, possibly to access the rich marrow inside.





The tools weren't made by humans - our oldest evidence of Homo sapiens is from about 300,000 years ago - but by a close ancestor. And their presence means we need to reconsider how humans and hominins spread through South East Asia.









A composite computer reconstruction of fossils from Jebel Irhoud shows a modern, flattened face paired with an archaic, elongated braincase © PHILIPP GUNZ, MPI EVA LEIPZIG



Here's what our understanding was before this epic find!





For decades, researchers seeking the origin of our species have scoured the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Now, their quest has taken an unexpected detour west to Morocco: Researchers have redated a long-overlooked skull from a cave called Jebel Irhoud to a startling 300,000 years ago, and unearthed new fossils and stone tools. The result is the oldest well-dated evidence of Homo sapiens, pushing back the appearance of our kind by 100,000 years.





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Archaeologist Gerrit van den Bergh from the University of Wollongong in Australia says that hominins most likely spread through the region in several waves throughout the millennia. He also believes that they probably travelled from north to south from China and Taiwan, rather than west to East from Borneo or Palawan through Indonesia, using the ocean currents and settling as they went. Eventually this migration could have landed on the Indonesian island of Flores to give rise to Homo floresiensis, also known as the "hobbit" for its small stature. Evidence of hominins dating back 700,000 years has been found on the Indonesian island of Java.













Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis by Atelier Elisabeth Daynes. Credit: Kinez Riza.





In addition, Homo floresiensis ancestors have been found on Flores from around the same time . Both of these finds are consistent with the new migration hypothesis. Previously, it had been thought that hominins didn't have boats, and therefore couldn't have travelled by water to reach Luzon and the other islands of Wallacea , the group of islands separated from mainland Australia and Asia by deep oceans. But the north-to-south migration hypothesis is supported by another fossil record: that of animals.





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