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The question of the ancestors

A long time it was believed that the Negritos, a curly-haired Zwergnegride who still live in their home area in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Andaman Islands, came from the Asian mainland via the Borneo-Palawan- land bridge along with Stegodon and Elephas (another original form of an elephant) and were recognized as the first human inhabitants of the Philippines. Archaeological investigations of the last twenty years give reasons for doubt to the established theory.

Ongoing excavations in the Cagayan Valley have brought up fossil remains of animals, which are believed to have been slaughtered for human consumption. Human tools were found near the dead animals found. This could mean, that the Homo erectus, probably of the aera of the Java and Peking man, inhabited the Cagayan Valley long time before the Negritos.

However, bones of a human-Cagayans one has yet been found. The oldest human remains in the country were found in 1962 in the Tabon Cave.

High on a cliff facing the South China Sea in the north of Palawan a fossilized skull of human bones of a femal Tabon were found, peeling tools and the bones of bats and birds. According to the radiocarbon research it was dated to 22 000 BC and has identified a femal Tabon and her roommate being as a cave Australoids.

If this classification confirm the speculation, it could verify that the Philippinos were the early folk of a fascinating race. Her family tree included in the roots the prehistoric ancestors of the Chinese and all Asian races. According to this theory, the Filipino developed from the same line as the ancestors of the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands and Australia.

These early humans are known today, Austronesians as their place of origin refer to the Asian mainland. After they had begun to build outrigger canoes and catamarans and to take cruises, they settled in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawaii, Micronesia, and the hundreds of atolls in the deep blue expanse of the eastern Pacific. There are indications that they were driven by typhoons and strong currents to Taiwan, Japan and North Korea.

"The performance of these sailors is unprecedented," said Jesus Peralta, the curator of the Philippine National Museum. "These people have accomplished feats in the navigation sector, as they spread out from East Asia to all over the Pacific." It is amazing which knowledge these Neolithic people must have had about astronomy, winds and currents. There is no question that these people can not really call as primitive who have already traveled on the largest water area in the world 6000-2000 BC.

It exists a new variant of this interesting continuation of the Austronesians hypothesis. Certain pieces of evidence - especially fossilized rice grains in Non Nak Tha, Thailand, have been found, polished stone tools and pottery from Hoa Binh in Vietnam. Scientists suggest that the Austronesian civilization could be older than that of the Indian or Chinese and the South East Asia its cradle.

The Philippines came about in the third millennium BC on the plan, when the Austronesians arrived with their outrigger boats and brought with them ceramics, wood carvings, bark cloth and the art of tattooing. The patterns of the tattoos were of complex geometrical art.

Today, these geometric decorations still guard the mats and in the manufacture of weapons, jewellery, vessels and clothing of cultural minorities use, living on the margins of the Christian civilizations of the country.


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