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LOOK: Archaeologists unearth rhino skeleton in the Philippines

  • Archaeologists have unearthed tools and a rhino skeleton on the island of Luzon that may point to the existence of a human relative from 700,000 years ago.

  • This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in island Southeast Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages.

A group of archaeologists discovered a butchered body of a rhinoceros in the Philippines that may point to the existence of humans on the island over 700,000 years ago.

As reported in the journal Nature, archaeological clues including the remains of the rhinoceros and an ancient stone tool were discovered in Luzon.

“We had the extraordinary luck to find a nearly complete, disarticulated rhinoceros,” said Thomas Ingicco, a paleoanthropologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study.

The bones of the rhino showed signs of cuts from removing of the flesh and tools used to remove the marrow.

“We know that some species of human ate this rhino,” said Ingicco.

“But we don’t know if they killed if first, or found the carcass.”

This discovery showed similarities to the way of living of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis in Indonesia during the same period.

Ingicco’s team also discovered several other skeletal remains of other animals including brown deer, monitor lizards, freshwater turtles and stegodons, extinct mammals combining elephant and mammoth features.

The discovery plays a big role in the scientific community as the last known proof of modern human existence in the country, called homimins, is the 67,000-year old bone discovered in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

“This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonialization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years,” the authors concluded.

With no bones of the humans who could have killed the animals, researches can only speculate on who they could be.

PHOTO FROM: French Museum of Natural History

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