Fossil bones and teeth of a previously unknown human species that lived more than 50,000 years ago have been found in the Philippines.

Scientists say they were around at the same time our own species was spreading from Africa to occupy the rest of the world.

Several feet and hand bones, a partial thigh bone, and teeth from at least three individuals were unearthed in Callao Cave on Luzon, the largest island in the Asian archipelago, in 2007, 2011 and 2015.

The new species has been dubbed Homo luzonensis.

In a study published by the journal Nature, scientists said tests on two samples showed minimum ages of 50,000 years and 67,000 years.


Although Homo sapiens are the only surviving member of our branch of the evolutionary tree, we have not been alone for most of our existence.

And according to Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario the find makes our understanding of human evolution in Asia "messier, more complicated and whole lot more interesting".

Image: Callao Cave on Luzon Island in the Philippines where the fossils were found

The main exodus of our own species from Africa that all of today's non-African people are descended from happened about 60,000 years ago.

After analysing the bones from Luzon, the study authors concluded they belonged to a previously unknown member of our "Homo" branch of the family tree.

Researchers said one of the toe bones and the overall pattern of tooth shapes and sizes differ from what has been seen before in the Homo family.

One of the study's authors, Florent Detroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, said the Homo luzonensis used stone tools and its small teeth suggest it might have been small-bodied.

He said Homo luzonensis lived in eastern Asia at around the same time as not only our species but other members of the Homo branch, including Neanderthals, their little-understood Siberian cousins the Denisovans, and the "hobbits" of the island of Flores in Indonesia.

Mr Detroit said our species is not known to have reached the Philippines until thousands of years after the age of the bones but some human relative was on Luzon more than 700,000 years ago, as the presence of stone tools and a butchered rhino dating to that time indicate.

Image: The size of the teeth suggest small-bodies creatures

He said it was not clear how Homo luzonensis is related to other species of Homo but he speculated that it might have descended from an earlier human relative, Homo erectus, that somehow crossed the sea to Luzon.

Homo erectus is generally considered the first Homo species to have expanded beyond Africa.

Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, said the Luzon find "shows we still know very little about human evolution, particularly in Asia" but he added that future similar discoveries will probably emerge with further work in the region.