An archeologist of the University of the Philippines, Professor Armand Mijares, has a collection of 67,000-year-old foot bones at his office in Quezon City that were unearthed from a cave network in northern Philippines in 2007. (Photo by KJ ROSALES)

MANILA (AFP) – Archaeologists have found a foot bone in Cagayan that could prove the Philippines was first settled by humans 67,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than previously thought, the National Museum said Tuesday.

The bone, found in an extensive cave network, predates the 47,000-year-old Tabon Man that is previously known as the first human to have lived in the coun-try, said Taj Vitales, a researcher with the museum’s archaeology section.“

This would make it the oldest human remains ever found in the Philippines,” Vitales told AFP. A team of archaeologists from the University of the Philippines and the National Museum dug up the third metatarsal bone of the foot in 2007 in the Callao caves near Penablanca, Cagayan.

Their report on what is now known as Callao Man was released in the latest editions of the Journal of Human Evolution after tests in France set the fossil’s age, said professor Armand Mijares, the expedition leader.“ This individual was small-bod-ied. It’s difficult to say whether he was male or female,” he said.Cut marks on deer and wild boar bones found around it suggest this individual could have hunted and was skilled with tools.“It broke the barriers,” Mijares said, explaining that previous evidence put the first human settlements in the Philippines and nearby islands around Tabon Man. "It pushed that back to nearly 70,000 years.”

However Mijares said the finding of it being a Homo sapien was still only provisional because some of the bone’s features were similar to Homo habilis and Homo floresiensis – which are distinct species from a human. Existing evidence suggests mod-ern man, or Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago.Mijares said his find shared many, but not all, of the features of the Aetas, a short, curly-haired and dark-skinned people who are thought to be directly descended from the first inhabitants of the Philippines.

It also suggests raft and boat-building crafts would have been around at that time. “You have to cross the open sea and you cannot do that without the skills in raft or boat building,” Mijares said. “The hyphotesis is that the Philippines, which is surrounded by bodies of water, was firstreached by humans aboard rafts,” Vitales said. But he said there was no con-sensus on whether the first settlers came from mainland Asia, neigh-boring Southeast Asian islands orelsewhere. Archaeologists have been exploring the Callao Caves system since the 1970s. “Generally caves are used as habitations and burialsites,” Vitales said. Mijares said his team plannedto secure permits and personnel to pursue further excavations inthe Callao caves.

Tabon Man, the fossilised frag-ments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, was discovered along with stone flake tools by a National Museum team in a cave in Palawan in May 1962.