About 709,000 years ago, a group of ancient humans used stone tools to butcher a dead rhino on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The find means our hominin cousins reached the Philippines much earlier than we previously knew.
The discovery may also throw new light on the origins of the mysterious 鈥�hobbits鈥�: tiny hominins that once inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores.
Researchers have long wondered whether Luzon was colonised by an ancient species of human deep in antiquity.
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In 2010, researchers working on the island announced they had found a 67,000-year-old foot bone. The bone may have belonged to a member of our species, but its unusual shape hinted that it belonged to an earlier form of human.
Prehistoric butchers
Now at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues may have settled the debate.
During excavations on Luzon, they found a near-complete skeleton of an extinct . Some of the bones are covered in cut marks. What鈥檚 more, the team found more than 50 stone artefacts that could have been used to dismember the carcass.
The rhino cannot have been butchered by modern humans. Most researchers believe our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa within the last 500,000 years 鈥� long after the 709,000-year-old rhino was killed.
Exactly who the ancient butcher was is not yet clear. We know that a species called Homo erectus lived in south-east Asia around this time. It has also been suggested that the ancestors of a mysterious group called the Denisovans colonised .
Nor is it clear how the mystery people reached Luzon. There is growing evidence that ancient human species reached remote islands, sparking fierce debate over whether they did so intentionally using watercraft, or by accident on natural rafts of mangroves. Ingicco says accidental colonisation is more likely.
Hobbit origins
But the key question is what happened to the ancient butchers after they arrived on Luzon. The biggest prize would be to find a link between the early inhabitants of Luzon and the enigmatic hobbits (Homo floresiensis), which lived on the island of Flores over 2000 kilometres to the south.
If you just look at a map, it seems obvious that the ancestors of H. floresiensis arrived on Flores by island-hopping from Java. This entails crossing a handful of straits, each just a few tens of kilometres wide. But some of the currents are treacherous, so crossing without boats is difficult.
Instead, some researchers think the ancestors of hobbits arrived on Flores by drifting from northerly islands like Sulawesi and the Philippines. This would have meant crossing wider expanses of water, but the prevailing currents in the region helpfully flow from north to south. The stone tools and butchered rhino are the oldest evidence that ancient humans occupied those northern islands, strengthening the idea.
鈥淚t seems likely that H. floresiensis, or rather its ancestor, got to Flores from the Philippines or Sulawesi,鈥� says at the Australian National University in Canberra.
鈥淎 hominin presence in the Philippines about 700,000 years ago is indeed potentially a first step towards solving the mystery of the origin of the Flores hominins,鈥� says Ingicco. But he says the evidence is still scanty.
Nature
