Prehistory[edit]

In 2010, a metatarsal from "Callao Man", discovered in 2007, was dated through uranium-series
dating as being 67,000 years old.[47]
Prior to that, the earliest human remains found in the Philippines were thought to be the fossilized
fragments of a skull and jawbone, discovered in the 1960s by Dr. Robert B. Fox,
an anthropologist from the National Museum.[48] Anthropologists who examined these remains
agreed that they belonged to modern human beings. These include the Homo sapiens, as
distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene Homo erectus species.
The "Tabon Man" fossils are considered to have come from a third group of inhabitants, who worked
the cave between 22,000 and 20,000 BCE. An earlier cave level lies so far below the level
containing cooking fire assemblages that it must represent Upper Pleistocene dates like 45 or 50
thousand years ago.[49] Researchers say this indicates that the human remains were pre-Mongoloid,
from about 40,000 years ago. Mongoloid is the term which anthropologists applied to the ethnic
group which migrated to Southeast Asia during the Holocene period and evolved into
the Austronesian people (associated with the Haplogroup O1 (Y-DNA) genetic marker), a group
of Malayo-Polynesian-speaking people including those from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia,
Malagasy, the non-Chinese Taiwan Aboriginals or Rhea's.[50]
Fluctuations in ancient shorelines between 150,000 BC and 17,000 BC connected the Malay
Archipelago region with Maritime Southeast Asia and the Philippines. This may have enabled
ancient migrations into the Philippines from Maritime Southeast Asia approximately 50,000 BC to
13,000 BC.[51]
A January 2009 study of language phylogenies by R. D. Gray at the University of California, Los
Angeles published in the journal Science, suggests that the population expansion of Austronesian
peoples was triggered by rising sea levels of the Sunda shelf at the end of the last ice age. This was
a two-pronged expansion, which moved north through the Philippines and into Taiwan, while a
second expansion prong spread east along the New Guinea coast and into Oceania and
Polynesia.[52]
The Negritos are likely descendants of the indigenous populations of the Sunda landmass and New
Guinea, pre-dating the Mongoloid peoples who later entered Southeast Asia.[53] Multiple studies also
show that Negritos from Southeast Asia to New Guinea share a closer cranial affinity with Australo-
Melanesians.[53][54] They were the ancestors of such tribes of the Philippines as the Aeta, Agta,
Ayta, Ati, Dumagat and other similar groups. Today they comprise just 0.03% of the total Philippine
population.[55]
The majority of present-day Filipinos are a product of the long process of evolution and movement of
people.[56] After the mass migrations through land bridges, migrations continued by boat during the
maritime era of South East Asia. The ancient races became homogenized into the Malayo-
Polynesians which colonized the majority of the Philippine, Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagos.[