PH prehistory pushed back further

That Philippine prehistory, previously set at 67,000 years ago, has been pushed back further to 709,000 years was unfortunately drowned out by the noise in politics and social media.

Two weeks ago, during a tour of the recently inaugurated National Museum of Natural History, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the new space is not entirely about the stuffed animals and birds in dusty glass cases or petrified insects and reptiles in formaldehyde-filled jars that usually form the boring backbone of any such institution. Aside from the stunning architecture carving a world-class space from the former Department of Tourism building, there are engaging exhibits of fossil stones from around the world, an exhibit on the Philippine Eagle, and a whole gallery devoted to a history of botanical research that goes way back to a Czech Jesuit missionary, Georg Joseph Kamel (1661-1706).

Kamel produced in Manila the first comprehensive accounts of Philippine flora and fauna. The camellia flower bears his name. When I was told that one of the stuffed Philippine Eagles in the museum was named “Gemma,” after former museum director and beauty queen Gemma Cruz Araneta, I asked if the other stuffed bird could be named “Loren,” after Sen. Loren Legarda, who supported the museum’s ethnographic exhibits.

From where I write, in urbanized 21st-century Makati, it is quite a stretch to imagine a time when elephants strolled around the Philippines. More difficult it is to even imagine the Elephas beyeri, an extinct type of dwarf elephant whose remains were found on Cabarruyan Island before the war and, when classified, was named in honor of the pioneering prehistorian of the Philippines, H. Otley Beyer.

In 2017 a complete skeleton of a Rhinoceros philippinensis was found in Rizal, Kalinga, together with the remains of a Philippine brown deer, a freshwater turtle, and what may be a stegodon. While no human remains were found with these slaughtered animals, the site dated to between 777 and 631,000 years ago yielded 57 stone tools and a piece of tektite, clear evidence of early man. A closer examination of the rhino bones showed butchery marks suggesting that it was cut up and defleshed in a manner only early humans could have made.

Based on these finds, we now know that early man in the Philippines is older than the “Tabon Man” found by Robert Fox in Palawan in 1962 that was previously dated 16,500 years ago, and much older than the “Callao Man” dated 67,000 years ago. Actually, what textbook history oversimplified as the Tabon Man is actually made up of a fossilized skull cap and jawbone that later research proved to have come from three separate individuals, including a woman. Later archeological excavations yielded stone tools in Cagayan that suggested early humans older than Tabon, but it was not until 2007 when a metatarsal or bone fragment from a hominid’s foot was found in Callao Cave, Cagayan. The Callao Man was tested in 2010, pushing evidence of early man in the Philippines back by 67,000 years.

Now our textbooks again need a revision, after we digested the arcane archeological text in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature. (I could not access it from outside a university internet connection without paying a hefty subscription fee even for just the article on the Philippines.)

The important part of the abstract reads: “This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages. The Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna, but also of archaic hominins.”

If the National Museum of Natural History were around when I was in college, biology and botany would have been relevant, or at least bearable, to me. The good news about our prehistory can give us momentary respite from: the brewing trouble in the Supreme Court, the removal of the comfort woman statue on Roxas Boulevard, our diplomatic row with Kuwait, and government officials who believe that delicadeza is best buried with the dinosaurs.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu