An obsession with Tabon Cave

Early this year, Omar Choa, a 32-year-old Filipino researcher scholar based in Paris, did the country proud as the first Filipino recipient of the Prix Leroi-Gourhan award for his work on the Tabon Cave in Palawan. The award, founded in 2008, was named after André Leroi-Gourhan, one of France’s foremost 20th- century thinkers in the humanities and social sciences, specifically the fields of ethnology, history and prehistoric archaeology.

To qualify for the award, one must be a current or recent doctoral student at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNDH) and engaged in research that would contribute to the scientific content of the Musée de l’Homme. The MNDH is a museum that offers master’s and doctoral programs.

Choa’s distinction is significant because it drew attention and gave visibility both nationally and internationally to Tabon Cave as the research site. Choa explains that, while many Filipinos have heard of Tabon Cave and vaguely associate it with prehistory (via the term “sinaunang tao”), the knowledge generally stops there.

Tabon Cave has been called the country’s cradle of civilization. According to Choa, it “anchors the significance of the Philippines in the archaeological map of Southeast Asia,” where early fossil remains of homo sapiens remain rare. Choa says it is one of the most studied sites in the country, with excavations beginning in the 1960s.

The Tabon Caves Complex, the cave network to which it belongs, and the surrounding area called Lipuun Point, are endowed with incredible biodiversity. Because of this,  the Tabon Caves Complex and Lipuun Point were declared a Site Museum Reservation (Presidential Proclamation No. 996, s. 1972), the namesake cave and its fossils declared National Cultural Treasures in 2012, and an application for inclusion in the Unesco World Heritage List was filed by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in 2006.

Unfortunately, the Unesco application has not prospered because of many factors, insufficient scientific research among them. Choa hopes his research on the geochemical history of Tabon Cave will help address this insufficiency.

Choa has successfully defended his dissertation, earning a doctoral degree in prehistory.

I knew Omar, a nephew of my sister-in-law Nancy Choa Sta. Romana, as a typical boy who was hooked on superhero figures and reading, thanks to a book-loving father.  What impressed me when I saw him next was his move from his Ateneo physics degree, minor in Japanese studies, to anthropology. He went to UP for a master’s in physics but found this field of science too specialized and “detached from everyday life.”

He was in search of something more interdisciplinary and happily discovered anthropology and geoarchaeology. He has long been obsessed with Tabon Cave, where 47,000-year-old human fossils were discovered. During frequent trips to the cave, he studied cave sediments, particularly guano or bat dung, using a variety of disciplines to know more about the environment and landscapes of the earliest inhabitants.

This period has not been easy to study because of the “extreme rarity” of human fossils in the region, attributed to the harsh tropical climate of Southeast Asia which does not preserve organic remains well. Tabon Cave is one of the very few sites that have yielded human fossils and other traces of human presence dating to prehistory.

The last slide in Choa’s defense presentation carried a citation from Dr. Robert Fox (1918-1985), prehistoric Philippine historian and chief anthropologist of the National Museum. Fox led the team that discovered the only Pleistocene human fossils found in the Philippines, and the fossilized Pleistocene skull of the oldest man in the country inside the Tabon Caves of the municipality of Quezon, Palawan: “It would be impossible to exaggerate the great archaeological potential of the Philippine Islands, which are intimately linked with the culture history of South China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific world.”

May the path blazed by Fox and now followed by committed Filipino archaeologists like Omar Choa continue to attract other impassioned individuals to yield evidence of times past, if only as a way to lead us to know and appreciate our heritage better.

Neni Sta. Romana Cruz (nenisrcruz@gmail.com) is chair of the National Book Development Board and a member of the Eggie Apostol Foundation.