Early humans arrived in the Philippines 700,000 years ago: study

Were the early humans roaming east Asia more than half-a-million years ago clever enough to build sea-faring watercraft and curious enough to cross a vast expanse of open sea? This and other questions arise from the discovery in the Philippines of a butchered rhinoceros skeleton and the stone tools probably used to carve away its meat, researchers said Wednesday. The find pushes back the arrival of the first homo species on the island chain ten-fold to 700,000 years ago, they reported in the journal Nature. Earlier archeological clues from Luzon island — tools at one site, pre-historic animals remains at another — hinted at the presence of primitive human species, echoing the way Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis probably populated the Indonesian archipelago during roughly the same period. But until now, the earliest confirmed evidence of hominins — the scientific term used to group modern and early humans — in the Philippines came from a single, 67,000-year old foot bone unearth