TABUK CITY, Kalinga – The international team of scientists who discovered that early man existed in the country as far back as 709,000 years ago through finds at the Elephant Hill archaeological site in San Pedro, Rizal, this province, unearthed more animal fossils and stone tools during their excavation activity on June 19-28.
Mayor Marcelo dela Cruz who witnessed the activity said that the finds include a 0.7 meter long bone believed to be that of a stegodon, an extinct elephant-like animal, around two meters from where the team dug up the near complete skeleton of a rhinoceros in 2014.
The mayor added that the bone just like the rhinoceros remains was 1.5 meters beneath the surface.
In their study which sent waves through the international scientific community when it was published by Nature, a widely respected scholarly journal, on May 2, the team stated the bones of the rhinoceros bore cut marks inflicted by human-made stone tools.
Dela Cruz further informed that aside from the large bone, the team also recovered several fossilized bones of small animals and several stone tools during the excavation.
Archaeologist Myline Lising of the Ateneo de Manila University anthropology department, a member of the team, said that they will continue to conduct research in the site because “we need to find more fossils and understand more about the site.”
“The publication in the Nature says that we have found indirect evidence of early humans via the cut marks on the fossils and the stone tools we have found. We still do not have direct evidence, meaning human fossils,” Lising said adding that finding the direct evidence may take a long time yet.
She said that if ever they succeed in unearthing a direct evidence of human presence in Kalinga, they would like to find out how they might be related to the Callao man whose 67,000-year old foot bone was discovered in the Callao Cave in nearby Penablanca, Cagayan in 2007.
The team of prehistory experts from France and the National Museum of the Philippines (NMP) is headed by Dr. Thomas Ingico of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France and Clyde Jago-on of the NMP.
The team started the current series of researches in 2013 but there had been sporadic excavations conducted in the site since the rhinoceros teeth fossils were found there yielding vertebrate fossils and stone tools among other archaeological and paleontological items.**By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
