Prehistory of the Philippines

Prehistory of the Philippines

Geographical Southeast Asia

range

Period Neolithic - Iron Age

Dates c. Before 900 AD.

Major sites Tabon Caves Angono Petroglyphs Sa Huyun

Kalanay Complex Banaue Rice Terraces

Preceded by Austronesian migration

Followed by Archaic Epoch

Part of a series on the

History of the Philippines

Prehistory (pre-900)

Neolithic age

 Callao and Tabon peoples

 Arrival of the Negritos
 Austronesian expansion
 Angono Petroglyphs
  Jade culture

Iron age

 Sa Huyun Culture
 Society of the Igorot
 Ancient barangays
 Kingdom of Tondo

Events/Artifacts

 Balangay
 grave goods
 Manunggul Jar
 Prehistoric gems
 Sa Huyun-Kalanay Complex
 Maitum Anthropomorphic Pottery

Pre-colonial period (900–1521)

Indianized (Buddhist-Hindu Kingdoms)

 Rajahnate of Butuan
 Rajahnate of Cebu
 Kedatuan of Madja-as
 Kingdom of Namayan

Sinified Kingdoms

 Luyag na Kaboloan
 Ma-i

Animist States

 Cheifdom of Taytay

Muslim States

 Kingdom of Maynila
 Sultanate of Sulu
 Sultanate of Maguindanao
 Lanao confederacy

Events/Artifacts
  Laguna Copperplate Inscription - c.900 AD.
 Limestone tombs
 Batanes citadels
 Golden Tara
 Gold Kinnara
 Ticao Stone Inscriptions
 Butuan Silver Paleograph
 Buddhist art
 Majapahit conflict - 1365
 Brunei War 1500

Colonial period (1521–1946)

Spanish era

 Battle of Mactan
 Sandugo
 Spanish capture of Manila
 New Spain
 Captaincy General
 Spanish East Indies
 Manila galleon
 Revolts and uprisings
 Chinese invasion
 Castilian War
 Sulu Sea pirates
 Doctrina Christiana
 Dutch invasions
 Brunei Civil War
 Bohol secession
 British Invasion
 Florante at Laura
 Propaganda Movement
 Gomburza
 Noli me tangere
 La Solidaridad
 El filibusterismo
 La Liga Filipina
 Katipunan
  Philippine Revolution
 Spanish–American War
 American capture of Manila
 Declaration of Independence
 First Republic
 Philippine–American War

American colonial period

 Tagalog Republic
 Negros Republic
 Zamboanga Republic
 Moro Rebellion
 Insular Government
 "Bayan Ko"
 Commonwealth
 Japanese occupation
 Second Republic
 Destruction of Manila

Post-colonial period (1946–1986)

 Treaty of Manila
 Third Republic
 Cold War
 Hukbalahap Rebellion
 SEATO
 Bandung Conference
 North Borneo dispute
 Marcos dictatorship
 ASEAN Declaration
 CPP–NPA–NDF rebellion
 Moro Conflict
 Spratly islands dispute
 Vietnamese boat people

Contemporary history (1986–present)

 People Power Revolution

 1986–90 coup attempts
  Pinatubo eruption
 1997 Asian financial crisis
 Second EDSA Revolution
 War on Terror
 South China Sea disputes
 Philippine Drug War

By topic
 Arts
 Languages
 Demographic
 Ancient religions
 Rulers
 Military History
 Honorifics
 Military
 Science and technology
 Political
 Communications
 Transportation

Timeline

Philippines portal

The prehistory of the Philippines covers the events prior to the written history of what is now
the Philippines. The current demarcation between this period and the Early history of the
Philippines is 21 April 900, which is the equivalent on the Proleptic Gregorian calendar for the date
indicated on the Laguna Copperplate Inscription—the earliest known surviving written record to
come from the Philippines. This period saw the immense change that took hold of the archipelago
from Stone Age cultures in the fourth century, continuing on with the gradual widening of trade until
900 and the first surviving written records.

Stone Age (c. 50,000 - c. 500 BC)

The first evidence of the systematic use of Stone Age technology in the Philippines is estimated to
50,000 BC,[1] and this phase in the development of proto-Philippine societies is considered to end
with the rise of metal tools in about 500 BC, albeit with stone tools still used past that
date.[2] Filipinoanthropologist F. Landa Jocano refers to the earliest noticeable stage in the
development of proto-Philippine societies as the Formative Phase.[3] He also identified stone tools
and ceramic manufacture as the two core industries that defined the period's economic activity, and
which shaped the means by which early Filipinos adapted to their environment during this period.[1]
By about 30,000 BC, the Negritos, who became the ancestors of today's aboriginal Filipinos (such as
the Aeta), probably lived in the archipelago. No evidence has survived which would indicate details
of ancient Filipino life such as their crops, culture, and architecture. Historian William Henry Scott
noted any theory which describes such details for the period must be pure hypothesis, and thus be
honestly presented as such.[4]
Callao Man (c. 67,000 BC)
Main article: Callao Man
The earliest known human remains in the Philippines are the fossilised remains discovered in 2007
in the Callao Caves in Cagayan. The 67,000-year-old find predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man,
which was until then the earliest known set of human remains in the archipelago. The find consisted
of a single 61 millimeter metatarsal which, when dated using uranium series ablation, was found to
be its current age. If definitively proven to be remains of Homo sapiens, it would also be one of the
oldest human remains in the Asia-Pacific.[5][6][7][8]
Tabon Man (c. 24,000 or 22,000 BC)
Main article: Tabon Man
Fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals had been discovered on May 28,
1962 by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum.[9] These fragments
are collectively called "Tabon Man" after the place where they were found on the west coast
of Palawan. Tabon Cave appears to be a kind of a Stone Age factory, with both finished stone flake
tools and waste core flakes having been found at four separate levels in the main chamber.
Charcoal left from three assemblages of cooking fires there has been Carbon-14 dated to roughly
7,000, 20,000, and 22,000 BC.[10] (In Mindanao, the existence and importance of these prehistoric
tools was noted by famed José Rizal himself, because of his acquaintance
with Spanish and German scientific archaeologists in the 1880s, while in Europe.)
Tabon Cave is named after the "Tabon bird" (Tabon scrubfowl, Megapodius cumingii), which
deposited thick hard layers of guano during the period when the cave was still uninhabited, resulting
to a cement-like floor made of bird dung where three succeeding groups of tool-makers settled. It is
indicated that about half of the 3,000 specimens recovered from the cave are discarded cores of a
material which had to be transported from some distance. The Tabon man fossils are considered to
have come from the third group of inhabitants who inhabited the cave between 22,000 and 20,000
BC. An earlier cave level lies so far below the level containing cooking fire assemblages that it must
represent Upper Pleistocene dates from 45 or 50 thousand years ago.[10]
Physical anthropologists who have examined the Tabon Man skullcap have agreed that it belonged
to a modern man (Homo sapiens), as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene Homo erectus species.
This indicates that Tabon Man was Pre-Mongoloid (Mongoloid being the term anthropologists apply
to the racial stock which entered Southeast Asia during the Holocene and absorbed earlier peoples
to produce the modern Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, and "Pacific" peoples). Two experts have given
the opinion that the mandible is "Australian" in physical type, and that the skullcap measurements
are most nearly like the Ainus or Tasmanians. Nothing can be concluded about Tabon man's
physical appearance from the recovered skull fragments except that he was not a Negrito.[11]
The custom of Jar Burial, which ranges from Sri Lanka, to the Plain of Jars, in Laos, to Japan, also
was practiced in the Tabon caves. A spectacular example of a secondary burial jar is owned by the
National Museum, a National Treasure, with a jar lid topped with two figures, one the deceased,
arms crossed, hands touching the shoulders, the other a steersman, both seated in a proa, with only
the mast missing from the piece. Secondary burial was practiced across all the islands of the
Philippines during this period, with the bones reburied, some in the burial jars. Seventy-eight
earthenware vessels were recovered from the Manunggul cave, Palawan, specifically for burial.
Migration theories
Main article: Models of migration to the Philippines
There have been several models of early human migration to the Philippines. Since H. Otley
Beyer and first proposed his wave migration theory, numerous scholars have approached the
question of how, when and why humans first came to the Philippines. The question of whether the
first humans arrived from the south (Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei as suggested by Beyer) or from
the north (via Taiwan as suggested by the Austronesian theory) has been a subject of heated debate
for decades. As new discoveries come to light, past hypotheses are reevaluated and new theories
constructed.
Beyer's wave migration theory (Theory of Waves of Migration)
The first, and most widely known theory of the prehistoric peopling of the Philippines is that of H.
Otley Beyer, founder of the Anthropology Department of the University of the
Philippines.[12] According to Dr. Beyer, the ancestors of the Filipinos came to the islands first via land
bridges which would occur during times when the sea level was low, and then later in seagoing
vessels such as the balangay. Thus he differentiated these ancestors as arriving in different "waves
of migration", as follows:[13]

1. "Dawn Man", a cave-man type who was similar to Java man, Peking Man, and other
Asian homo erectus of 250,000 years ago.
2. The aboriginal pygmy group, the Negritos, who arrived between 25,000 and 30,000
years ago.
3. The seafaring tool-using Indonesian group who arrived about 5,000 to 6,000 years
ago and were the first immigrants to reach the Philippines by sea.
4. The seafaring, more civilized Malays who brought the Iron ageculture and were the
real colonizers and dominant cultural group in the pre-Hispanic Philippines.
Beyer's theory, while still popular among lay Filipinos, has been generally been disputed by
anthropologists and historians. Reasons for doubting it are founded on Beyer's use of 19th
century scientific methods of progressive evolution and migratory diffusion as the basis for his
hypothesis. These methods have since been proven to be too simple and unreliable to explain
the prehistoric peopling of the Philippines.[14]
Objections to the land bridges theory
In February 1976, Fritjof Voss, a German scientist who studied the geology of the Philippines,
questioned the validity of the theory of land bridges. He maintained that the Philippines was
never part of mainland Asia. He claimed that it arose from the bottom of the sea and, as the thin
Pacific crust moved below it, continued to rise. It continues to rise today. The country lies along
great Earth faults that extend to deep submarine trenches. The resulting
violent earthquakes caused what is now the land masses forming the Philippines to rise to the
surface of the sea. Dr. Voss also pointed out that when scientific studies were done on the
Earth's crust from 1964 to 1967, it was discovered that the 35-kilometer- thick crust underneath
China does not reach the Philippines. Thus, the latter could not have been a land bridge to the
Asian mainland. The matter of who the first settlers were has not been really resolved. This is
being disputed by anthropologists, as well as Professor H. Otley Beyer, who claims that the first
inhabitants of the Philippines came from the Malay Peninsula. The Malays now constitute the
largest portion of the populace and what Filipinos now have is an Austronesian culture.
Philippine historian William Henry Scott has pointed out that Palawan and the Calamianes
Islands are separated from Borneo by water nowhere deeper than 100 meters, that south of a
line drawn between Saigon and Brunei does the depth of the South China Sea nowhere
exceeds 100 meters, and that the Strait of Malacca reaches 50 meters only at one point.[15] Scott
also asserts that the Sulu Archipelago is not the peak of a submerged mountain range
connecting Mindanao and Borneo, but the exposed edge of three small ridges produced
by tectonic tilting of the sea bottom in recent geologic times. According to Scott, it is clear that
Palawan and the Calamianes do not stand on a submerged land bridge, but were once a
hornlike protuberance on the shoulder of a continent whose southern shoreline used to be the
present islands of Java and Borneo. Mindoro and the Calamianes are separated by a channel
more than 500 meters deep[16]
Bellwood's Austronesian diffusion theory (Austronesian Model)

The principal branches of the Malayo-Polynesian Language Family. Orange is Outer Western Malayo-
Polynesian, dark red is Inner Western Malayo-Polynesian, green is Central Malayo-Polynesian, purple
is South Halmahera–West New Guinea languages, and pink is Oceanic. (Some areas with oceanic
languages are not visible on this map.)

The popular contemporary alternative to Beyer's model is Peter Bellwood’s Out-of-Taiwan

(OOT) hypothesis, which is based largely on linguistics, hewing very close to Robert Blust’s
model of the history of the Austronesian language family, and supplementing it with
archeological data.[17]
This model suggests that between 4500 BC and 4000 BC, developments in agricultural
technology in the Yunnan Plateau in China created pressures which drove certain peoples to
migrate to Taiwan. These people either already had or began to develop a unique language of
their own, now referred to as Proto-Austronesian.
By around 3000 BC, these groups started differentiating into three or four distinct subcultures,
and by 2500 to 1500 BC, one of these groups began migrating southwards towards the
Philippines and Indonesia, reaching as far as Borneo and the Moluccas by 1500 BC, forming
new cultural groupings and developing unique languages.
By 1500 BC, some of these groups started migrating west, reaching as far
as Madagascar around the 1st millennium. Others migrated east, settling as far as Easter
Island by the mid-13th century, giving the Austronesian language group the distinction of being
one of the most widely distributed language groups in the world at that time, in terms of the
geographical span of the homelands of its languages.
According to this theory, the peoples of the Philippines are the descendants of those cultures
who remained on the Philippine islands when others moved first southwards, then eastward and
westward.
Solheim's Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network (NMTCN) or island
origin theory
Wilhelm Solheim's concept of the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication
Network (NMTCN), while not strictly a theory regarding the biological ancestors of modern
Southeast Asians, does suggest that the patterns of cultural diffusion throughout the Asia-Pacific
region are not what would be expected if such cultures were to be explained by simple
migration. Where Bellwood based his analysis primarily on linguistic analysis, Solheim's
approach was based on artifact findings. On the basis of a careful analysis of artifacts, he
suggests the existence of a trade and communication network that first spread in the Asia-
Pacific region during its Neolithic age (c.8,000 to 500 BC). According to Solheim's NMTCN
theory, this trade network, consisting of both Austronesian and non-Austronesian seafaring
peoples, was responsible for the spread of cultural patterns throughout the Asia-Pacific region,
not the simple migration proposed by the Out-of-Taiwan hypothesis. Solheim 2006
Solheim came up with four geographical divisions delineating the spread of the NMTCN over
time, calling these geographical divisions "lobes." Specifically, these were the central, northern,
eastern and western lobes.
The central lobe was further divided into two smaller lobes reflecting phases of cultural spread:
the Early Central Lobe and the Late Central Lobe. Instead of Austronesian peoples originating
from Taiwan, Solheim placed the origins of the early NMTCN peoples in the "Early Central
Lobe," which was in eastern coastal Vietnam, at around 9000 BC.
He then suggests the spread of peoples around 5000 BC towards the "Late central lobe",
including the Philippines, via island Southeast Asia, rather than from the north as the Taiwan
theory suggests. Thus, from the Point of view of the Philippine peoples, the NMTCN is also
referred to as the Island Origin Theory.
This "late central lobe" included southern China and Taiwan, which became "the area where
Austronesian became the original language family and Malayo-Polynesian developed." In about
4000 to 3000 BC, these peoples continued spreading east through Northern Luzon to
Micronesia to form the Early Eastern Lobe, carrying the Malayo-Polynesian languages with
them. These languages would become part of the culture spread by the NMTCN in its
expansions Malaysia and western towards Malaysia before 2000 BC, continuing along coastal
India and Sri Lanka up to the western coast of Africa and Madagascar; and over time, further
eastward towards its easternmost borders at Easter Island. Thus, as in the case of Bellwood's
theory, the Austronesian languages spread eastward and westward from the area around the
Philippines. Aside from the matter of the origination of peoples, the difference between the two
theories is that Bellwood's theory suggests a linear expansion, while Solheim's suggests
something more akin to concentric circles, all overlapping in the geographical area of the late
central lobe which includes the Philippines.
Jocano's local origins theory (Core Population)
Another alternative model is that asserted by anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of
the Philippines, who in 2001 contended that the existing fossil evidence of ancient humans
demonstrates that they not only migrated to the Philippines, but also to New Guinea, Borneo,
and Australia. In reference to Beyer's wave model, he points out that there is no definitive way to
determine the "race" of the human fossils; the only certain thing is that the discovery of Tabon
Man proves that the Philippines was inhabited as early as 21,000 or 22,000 years ago. If this is
true, the first inhabitants of the Philippines would not have come from the Malay Peninsula.
Instead, Jocano postulates that the present Filipinos are products of the long process of
evolution and movement of people. He also adds that this is also true of Indonesians and
Malaysians, with none among the three peoples being the dominant carrier of culture. In fact, he
suggests that the ancient humans who populated Southeast Asia cannot be categorized under
any of these three groups. He thus further suggests that it is not correct to consider Filipino
culture as being Malayan in orientation.[18]
Genetic studies
2001 Stanford University study
A Stanford University study conducted during 2001 revealed that Haplogroup O3-M122 (labeled
as "Haplogroup L" in this study) is the most common Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup found
among Filipinos. This particular haplogroup is also predominant among Chinese, Koreans, and
Vietnamese. Another haplogroup, Haplogroup O1a-M119 (labeled as "Haplogroup H" in this
study), is also found among Filipinos. The rates of Haplogroup O1a are highest among the
Taiwanese aborigines, and Chamic-speaking people. Genetic data found among a sampling of
Filipinos may indicate some relation to the Ami tribe of Taiwan.[19]
2008 Leeds University study
A 2008 genetic study showed no evidence of a large-scale Taiwanese migration into the
Philippine Islands. A study by Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and
Evolution, showed that mitochondrial DNA lineages have been evolving within Island Southeast
Asia (ISEA) since modern humans arrived approximately 50,000 years ago. Population
dispersals occurred at the same time as sea levels rose, which resulted in migrations from the
Philippine Islands into Taiwan within the last 10,000 years.[20]
Other studies
A 2002 China Medical University study indicated that some Filipinos shared genetic
chromosome that is found among Asian people, such as Taiwanese aborigines, Indonesians,
Thais, and Chinese.[21]
A variety of research study by the University of the Philippines, genetic chromosome were found
in Filipinos which are shared by people from different parts of East Asia, and Southeast Asia.
The predominant genotype detected was SC, the Southeast Asian genotype.[22] However, only
about 50 urine samples were collected for the study, far below the minimum sample size needed
to account for credible test results.
Conclusions
These indigenous elements in the Filipino's genetic makeup serve as clues to the patterns of
migration throughout Philippine prehistory. After the 16th century, of course, the colonial period
saw the influx of genetic influence from Europeans. During the above-mentioned study
conducted by Stanford University Asia-Pacific Research Center, it was stated that 3.6% of the
Philippine population has varying degrees of European ancestry from Spanish, and American
colonization.[19] However, only 28 individuals from the Philippines were genotyped for this study,
again a sample size far below the minimum sample size needed to account for credible test
results in a population of over 90 million individuals.[23]