New human species discovered in PH
Credit to Author: DIVINA NOVA JOY DELA CRUZ| Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2019 13:44:49 +0000
A new human species called “Homo luzonesis” was discovered by an international team, led by a Filipino professor, in Cagayan.
The groundbreaking discovery at the Callao Cave in Peñablanca was published by British multidisciplinary scientific journal Nature at 2 a.m.on Thursday (Philippine time), which comes as a formal announcement and recognition of the new human species.
University of the Philippines Associate Professor Armand Salvador Mijares led the team whose members were paleoanthropologist Florent Détroit of France’s National Museum of Natural History, zooarcheologist Philip Piper of the Australian National University, and geochronologist Rainer Grün of Australia’s Griffith University.
Mijares and his team found fossils of bones and teeth of at least three individuals excavated separately in 2007, 2011 and 2015. The fossils were recovered from a sedimentary level, three meters below the surface of the cave floor.
The fossils found were two hand bones, two foot bones, one femur and six maxillary teeth that had showed a combination of primitive features resembling Australopithecus and more modern ones similar to Homo sapiens that made it distinct from other Homo species.
“What we have right now is a mosaic of archaic, Australopithecine-type features in both the teeth and the bones and some homo sapien derived features, so it’s a combination. With that it cannot be Homo sapiens, it has to be a new species. So that now, we introduced the new species as Homo luzonensis,” Mijares said, explaining that the name was derived from a standard geographic taxonomy convention indicating that the species was first found in Luzon.
The fossils were identified to be from 50,000 to 67,000 years old, which charted them as the earliest human remains to be discovered in the Philippines.
Mijares said that most of the materials were analyzed in France and the dating was done in Australia.
Mijares said that the discovery has contributed additional knowledge to human evolution. Homo luzonensis is the fourth human species to be discovered in Asia, along with the Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Homo floresiensis, which was discovered in Indonesia in 2004.
“Very few people could identify and present a new species, very rare. There are only four species in Asia and we have one of them,” Mijares said.
Mijares said that the discovery has put the Philippines under the radar of human evolution research.
“Before the discovery of this new species, we [the Philippines] are always in the periphery of human evolution debate. We are now one of the regional centers for human evolutionary research,” Mijares said.
“Dati wala tayo eh, ngayon tayo na ang bida. So this is our contribution to the world, a Philippine contribution as such,” Mijares added.
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