Throughout history, there have been a number of human species- and researchers are continually
discovering new ones.
A recent discovery in the Philippines has changed our understanding of when our ancestors
first reached the islands- and this is surprising because the country, as we know it, is completely
surrounded by water- so who are they, and how did they get there?
Homo Sapiens, our species, were not the first type of human to live on earth.
You’ll have probably heard of Neanderthals, who first appeared about 230,000 years ago…
but there have been at least 17 others species of humans- with the oldest known ancestor,
the Orrorin tugenensis, walking the earth about 5.8 million years ago.
The original humans lived in Africa, and it wasn’t until about 1.5 million years ago
that the Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors that was a hunter-gatherer, began to migrate
beyond Africa to as far away as Asia.
Homo Sapiens first developed about 195,000 years ago, and soon began to migrate across
Europe and Asia.
Speech is thought to have developed 45,000 years later, and it was only 12,000 years
ago that they reached the Americas.
Until about 12,000 years ago, there were still other species of human, alongside our own.
It had long been thought that the first species to reach the Philippines was our own Homo
Sapiens about 100,000 years ago.
A recent discovery has changed the understanding of when humans first arrived in the Philippines,
though.
In May of 2018, a paper was released that detailed the discovery of evidence that they
were there a lot earlier than previously thought.
During an archaeological dig at a site at Kalinga, in the Cagayan Valley of the northern
Luzon in the Philippines, researchers found 57 stone tools alongside the skeletons of
stegodon, Philippine brown deer, turtles, monitor lizards and, most importantly a Rhinoceros
philippinensis.
Crucially, this Rhinoceros skeleton has clear signs of scratching from butchery- an act
that has only ever been performed by humans.
This, in itself, may not be too surprising, because similar evidence is found around the
world, but these tools and skeletons were found within a clay-rich bone bed that has
been dated to between 727 and 701 thousand years ago.
This proves that a human species was present around that time, many hundreds of thousands
of years earlier than had been thought.
The species believed to be most likely present at this time is Homo erectus, but no human
bones have been found at the site.
In Indonesia, about 3,000 kilometers away, evidence of a new species of human, the Homo
floresiensis, has been discovered, which could suggest that there were many more that we
don't know about, and there could even have been a different species that evolved independently
to one another on each island in the region.
The strange thing about this discovery is that the Philippines are completely surrounded
by ocean, so how did our ancestors reach these islands?
The answer is not, as you might think, due to the earth's changing geography.
The sea levels used to be a lot lower than they are today, particularly during ice ages,
but it would have still been too deep to simply walk across.
Instead, it's thought that they were carried to these islands by accident- whether it be
on tsunami waves or floating lands of debris that were carried across in storms.
It's not thought that Homo erectus purposefully crossed the water, but it's still a possibility.
Recent research in the Mediterranean has found evidence that stone age people were using
boats more than 130,000 years ago, which suggests that ancient human species were far more capable
than we tend to think.
Humans have lived on this planet in various guises for millions of years.
While our own species is the only one that remains and has been around for almost 200,000
years, there have been many more that predate us.
We know very little about most of these species, though, or how they lived- and it's virtually
impossible to be sure how many others there have been.
It's no surprise that new species, and evidence of human life, is being found- such as in
the discovery in the Philippines- Our understanding of our ancestors is only
just beginning!