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The world is introduced to Homo luzonensis – a news roundup

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Bone from Callao Cave. Source: Rob Rownd / Nature.com 20190410

Big archaeology news from last week that has made news around the world as the announcement of a new identified human species from the Philippines, dubbed Homo luzonensis. The paper was published in Nature and it describes new bones discovered from the same stratigraphic later as the Callao Man, which was previously described as a diminutive human that lived in the Philippines 67,000 years ago. With the discovery of additional bones from at least three other individual, the team from France, the Philippines and Australia have enough data to describe it as a new species.

The discovery puts Philippine archaeology in the spotlight, with last year’s discovery of a fossil rhino with butcher marks dating more than 700,000 years old (see here and here). More excavations are being planned in Cagayan, and this discovery, along with the previous discovery of Homo floresiensis will put a lot of focus on human evolution and Southeast Asia’s role in it.

Here’s the link to the Nature paper, links to news articles below:

A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines
Nature, 568, pp. 181–186 (2019)

A hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007 in Callao Cave (Northern Luzon, the Philippines) and dated to 67 thousand years ago provided the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines. Analysis of this foot bone suggested that it belonged to the genus Homo, but to which species was unclear. Here we report the discovery of twelve additional hominin elements that represent at least three individuals that were found in the same stratigraphic layer of Callao Cave as the previously discovered metatarsal. These specimens display a combination of primitive and derived morphological features that is different from the combination of features found in other species in the genus Homo (including Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens) and warrants their attribution to a new species, which we name Homo luzonensis. The presence of another and previously unknown hominin species east of the Wallace Line during the Late Pleistocene epoch underscores the importance of island Southeast Asia in the evolution of the genus Homo.

News articles:

Categories: Bones Papers Philippines Prehistory

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