i recently started reading ‘Sapiens’ by yuval noah harari and i haven’t finished it yet so this is not a review. i’m simply already having a lot of thoughts.
one thing that immediately got me while reading it was the fact that homo sapiens once shared the planet with several other human species.
let that sink in for a second.
homo sapiens—us, the human species alive today—were not always the only humans around. there were other species of human beings walking around at the same time. and i don’t mean different races or populations. i mean different species of human beings.
today, every living person you have ever met belongs to the same species. but there was a time when that wasn’t true. you could have two beings who were both recognizably human—walking upright, making tools, living in groups, doing human shit—and they could still belong to entirely different species.
think horses and donkeys, except instead of looking at two different kinds of animal, imagine looking at two different kinds of human.
which is insane???????????????
and so this made me wonder: if there used to be all these different human species around the world, did any of them ever live in the philippines?
as it turns out, yes.
we have our own!@!!!#!#
the first evidence of this human species was discovered in 2007, when archaeologists found a single foot bone in callao cave dated to around 67,000 years ago.
they could tell it belonged to the genus homo, but they couldn’t tell which species. more remains later turned up from at least 3 individuals, and what’s fun is that their features didn’t quite match any known human species.
so by 2019, researchers had enough evidence to argue that they were looking at an entirely new one:
homo luzonensis.
BROOOOOO
a whole entire human species named after luzon?????
i’m sorry, that is just so fucking cool to me. like??? philippines mentioned???? in paleoanthropology????
i know this is probably an extremely unserious reaction to an important discovery, but there is something so cool about realizing that the islands we now call the philippines were already part of this enormous, complicated story of human evolution.
and not only that, since i fell down this rabbit hole, i somehow found an even older guy.
in kalinga, archaeologists found evidence that somebody was already here around 709,000 years ago.
that’s more than 600,000 years before the homo luzonensis remains we just talked about.
it is also before homo sapiens existed!!!!!!!!!!!
WE HAD NOT EVEN SPAWNED YET AND SOMEBODY WAS ALREADY IN LUZON DOING SHITTTTTTT
the shit in question:
killing and eating a wholeass rhinoceros.
archaeologists found the remains of an extinct philippine rhinoceros with cut marks all over its bones, along with dozens of stone tools. some of the bones had even been intentionally smashed open. that’s how we know somebody was there. we found the tools they made and the rhino they apparently made a whole buffet out of.
i think it is extremely cool that somewhere in luzon, 709,000 years ago, an unidentified human relative was having a lovely rhinoceros dinner.
somebody was here before us, science cannot tell us who, and somehow i have reached the end of this post with the exact same question i started with.
things i looked at while falling into this hole
national museum of the philippines — vertebrate fossils from rizal, kalinga
harari, yuval noah. sapiens: a brief history of humankind (culprit responsible for the entire incident)
niña's blog 