Map of Southeast Asia and the wider region during the Late Pleistocene period. The Flores fossils suggest that hominins cut off on this Wallacean island survived for hundreds of millennia and underwent unexpected evolutionary changes, including shrinking dramatically in both body and brain size. The “Hobbit trail” may begin in the Philippines! The Luzon find is important to the Hobbit story because it now looks like the northern part of Wallacea was the source of origin for the hominin population that first reached Flores (via Sulawesi) on the southern fringes of Wallacea. The earliest hominin fossils from this island are 700,000 years old and belong to a Hobbit-like population that may be directly ancestral to Homo floresiensis. The oldest stone tools on Flores date back at least one million years.
It is more likely that rare events are the mechanism behind hominin populations taking root on oceanic islands near Asia, like Flores, Sulawesi, and Luzon: for instance, hominins may have been swept out to sea by tsunamis and survived ocean crossings by clinging to floating vegetation.ĭebris from the 2011 tsunami carried hundreds of species across the Pacific Ocean This is not to say that such a scenario is impossible, but I think if it were so then we would already have evidence that archaic hominins got to more remote parts of the region, including Australia.Įxcavations at the Kalinga site in the Cagayan Valley of Luzon. I think most scientists will be reluctant to accept the idea of archaic hominins paddling beyond Eurasia in purpose-built watercraft, even very rudimentary ones. The Luzon team concludes that hominins of some kind had established a presence in the northern Philippines during the Middle Pleistocene epoch (between 781,000 and 126,000 years ago), that they must have come originally from Borneo to the southwest or Taiwan to the north, and that they could potentially have used boats. That said, it is now clear that Wallacea is a highly enigmatic region with a complex role in the human evolutionary story, so I would not rule out the possibility that an entirely unknown species inhabited Luzon.
However, the most likely candidate is Homo erectus, a widespread species that inhabited Java from 1.2 million years ago, and was also in China – this would also include “ the Hobbit” ( Homo floresiensis) from Flores, which may be a dwarfed Homo erectus.Ī 700,000-year-old fossil find shows the Hobbits’ ancestors were even smaller Given that archaic hominins were able to colonise Sulawesi and Flores, it stands to reason that they also could have made it to the Philippines – but until now conclusive evidence for this has been lacking.Īt this stage we don’t know which species the early tool-makers in Luzon belonged to, owing to the lack of hominin fossils from the rhino site. The research team in Cagayan Valley, Luzon, Phillipines.
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