Our species, Homo sapiens, weren’t the first humans to leave Africa—not by a long shot. The remarkable discovery of a 709,000-year-old butchered rhino fossil in the Philippines shows that so-called archaic humans were romping around the islands of southeast Asia a full 400,000 years before our species even existed.
That premodern humans had made their way to Luzon, the largest island in the Philippines, by 709,000 years ago is not a complete shocker. Prior archaeological discoveries have suggested that early humans, likely a form of Homo erectus, had settled in southeast Asia as far back as 1.5 million to 1.8 million years ago, with evidence of archaic humans living in Java and Sumatra by around 500,000 to 800,000 years ago. Evidence of stone tools dating back to similar time periods have also been found scattered among the remains of prey animals on the Southeast Asian islands of Sulawesi and Flores.
As for the Philippines, however, the oldest trace of human activity came in the form of a single foot bone dating back a “mere” 67,000 years. But as new evidence published today in Nature demonstrates, early humans had made their way to this island long before then; Luzon is now the third major southeast Asian island to have hosted early humans (Sulawesi and Flores being the other two). Incredibly, these venturous hominids somehow made their way to the island around 709,000 years ago, long before anatomically modern humans arrived on the scene, which happened no earlier than 100,000 years ago.
Read more: https://gizmodo.com/stunning-discovery-shows-early-humans-were-hunting-rhin-1825686009
