Stone-Age Philippines

Then in his 80s, the late E. Arsenio Manuel held fort in the UP Anthropology Department, teaching a graduate class in Philippine Pre-History. He was hard of hearing and his eyesight had grown dim except for reading, and his students were bored witless. Although I was  not enrolled in his class, I religiously attended his lectures—a monologue actually—fascinated by his experience, awed by his research. The only time he wrote on the blackboard was on the first day of class: “Where  history ends, anthropology begins.” As he explained that historians were bound by written documents, I was reminded of his friend, the historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo who roared: “No document. No history!” While it is correct to associate the “prehistoric” with dinosaurs and cavemen, the word itself obscures its real meaning, which is a  time “before written records.” Generation X seldom uses the word  “prehistoric” to describe something old, preferring instead “Jurassic,” from the dinosaur movie “Jurassic Park.”

Inspired by Doctor Manuel, I made a career shift dreaming to be an archeologist like Indiana Jones, but at the time there was no archeology program available in the Philippines. The first and only MA in Archeology was offered once in the Ateneo and only had three graduates: Cecilia Y. Locsin, Maria Isabel G. Ongpin and Socorro Paterno whose thesis, titled “A Lemery Archeological Sequence,” was finally recently published, after three decades.

Today we have the UP Archeological  Studies Program under my friend Dr. Victor Paz who started as a historian but became an archeologist abroad. I gave up on archeology when I realized there were so many Natural Science components in the curriculum: Botany, Zoology, Chemistry, etc. One reason I became a  historian was that I was not keen on Math and Science. I returned to history after experiencing backbreaking work under the sun. I prefer the air-conditioned comfort of a library. Nevertheless, I have  maintained my interest in prehistory, attracted by artifacts like: Chinese porcelain; Philippine earthenware; and skulls and stone tools, the primary sources for prehistory (unlike documents, they do not speak, and the stories they tell have to be teased out using another method).

Under National Museum Director Jeremy Barns many significant archeological artifacts were brought out of storage and put on display. These cultural treasures that we came to know of in the past only through picture books can now be enjoyed through public viewing. You should go to the museum on your own, it is a lot more pleasant than being hurriedly herded from room to room during a grade-school field trip.

Contrary to popular belief, the earliest evidence of the presence of man in the Philippines is not the famous skull cap and jaw that comprise what is now known as “The Tabon Man,” but the stone tools found in the Cagayan Valley. It is not widely known that stone tools were excavated from the plains of Liwan on the Cagayan Valley close to Kalinga-Apayao, together with the fossils of an extinct kind of Philippine elephant. These stone tools fashioned from quartz look so ordinary to the untrained eye that if you see them on the ground, you will ignore them. Early man struck rocks and broke them into fragments with a sharp cutting edge called flake and pebble-cobble tools. They may be crude to us in the 21st century, but one cannot underestimate the technological advance these tools represented for ancient man. A stone tool cannot be fashioned by animals without hands like ours. Monkeys may be  the closest to us biologically, but they don’t have the intelligence to sharpen and make use of these tools.

These stone tools have been associated with the Awidon Mesa formed in the Ice Age. A tektite found there and subjected to a potassium argon test gave off a date of 0.92 million years. With a margin of error of 0.17 years, this converts, by normal counting, to about 750,000 years ago! There are people who specialize in stone tools, arranging  them into dates and types. The late Fr. Frank Lynch of the Ateneo Anthropology Department wrote a monograph on stone tools that, though dated, is one of the standard references on the topic; as is a two-volume obscure work on Philippine Tektites, also known as “Rizalites,” by the pioneering prehistorian of the Philippines, H. Otley Beyer who amassed a huge collection of these black rocks that fell from space. One must have a special vocation and temperament to study rocks and stone tools, which are common throughout Southeast Asia.

I was recently in museums in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, where I was drawn to glass cases with Oriental ceramics, earthenware and stone tools, thinking that these mute artifacts hold clues to our origins and our connection with neighboring countries and cultures.

The Cagayan stone tools are older than the Tabon Man, but the puzzle is that while the tools have been found, giving evidence of the existence of early man up north and while the remains of animals eaten by ancient man have been excavated with these tools, we have yet to find the remains of someone archeologists will call the Cagayan Man. This is what makes prehistory so fascinating, it is a new field and National Museum experts like Dr.  Willie Ronquillo and Dr. Bong Dizon are pushing history further back than memory and written records, slowly painting a colored picture from the gray area we know as Philippine prehistory.

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