International researchers uncovered the ancient remains of two adults and a child on Luzon Island in the Philippines. Professor Philip Piper, co-author and a lead member of the team who discovered the 50,000 year-old fossils said, "The fossil remains included adult finger and toe bones, as well as teeth. We also recovered a child's femur. There are some really interesting features-for example, the teeth are really small,"
The new species called Homo luzonensis--named after the island--is said to have small teeth, which is sometimes relative to the overall size of mammals, suggesting the prehistoric species was rather small in stature. "It's quite incredible, the extremities, that is the hand and feet bones are remarkably Australopithecine-like. The Australopithecines last walked the earth in Africa about 2 million years ago and are considered to be the ancestors of the Homo group, which includes modern humans." said Piper.
"So, the question is whether some of these features evolved as adaptations to island life, or whether they are anatomical traits passed down to Homo luzonensis from their ancestors over the preceding 2 million years," Piper explained.
While there are still plenty of questions around the origins of Homo luzonensis, and their longevity on the island of Luzon, recent excavations near Callao Cave produced evidence of a slaughtered rhino and stone tools dating to around 700,000 years ago.
"No hominin fossils were recovered, but this does provide a timeframe for a hominin presence on Luzon. Whether it was Homo luzonensis butchering and eating the rhinoceros remains to be seen," Piper said. "It makes the whole region really significant. The Philippines is made up of a group of large islands that have been separated long enough to have potentially facilitated archipelago speciation. There is no reason why archaeological research in the Philippines couldn't discover several species of hominin. It's probably just a matter of time."
Homo luzonensis shares some unique skeletal features with the famous Homo floresiensis or 'the hobbit', discovered on the island of Flores to the southeast of the Philippine archipelago. In addition, stone tools dating to around 200,000 years ago have been found on the island of Sulawesi, meaning that ancient hominins potentially inhabited many of the large islands of Southeast Asia.
The project team was led by Dr. Armand Mijares of the University of the Philippines, along with Dr. Florent Détroit of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and researchers from the University of Bordeaux, Paul Sabatier University and the University of Poitiers in France, as well as Griffith University in Australia.
