A tiny foot that might step on the toes of some big names in paleoanthropology.
Sometimes it takes awhile for greatness to be truly recognized. A metatarsal, found in Callao Cave in 2007 was just confirmed to be human, and 67,000 years old. And that’s not all – it belonged to a very small adult living in the Philippines. This metatarsal pushes back the chronology of human settlement of the Pacific back another 27,000 years, bolsters claims of ancient small-bodied humans found on Flores Island (nicknamed “hobbits” by the media), and predates the currently-accepted arrival of morphologically modern humans into Asia. That’s a lot for one little bone to accomplish!
Archaeologist Armand Mijares was in a digging site in northern Philippines when he got an e-mail informing him that human toe bone his team found in 2007 was at least 67,000 years old. Mijares and his colleagues were so happy to have received the e-mail that they celebrated that night, drinking cold bottles of beer.
Mijares has every reason to celebrate, as the discovery of a 67, 000 year-old human remains in Callao Cave in the province of Cagayan is perhaps one of the biggest recent discoveries in the field of archaeology.
“This breaks up all standards. This discovery (of the toe bone in Callao cave) put the Philippines in the global scientific map,” Mijares declared in an interview with Xinhua.
(PS: I like how they had to specify that the beer was COLD).
