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Tabon man refers to fossilized human remains discovered on the island of Palawan in the Philippines on May 28, 1962 by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum. These remains, the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, were and are the earliest human remains known in the Philippines.^[1] These fragments are collectively called "Tabon Man" after Tabon Cave, the place where they were found on the west coast of Palawan. Tabon Cave appears to be a kind of Stone Age factory, with both finished stone flake tools and waste core flakes having been found at four separate levels in the main chamber. Charcoal left from three assemblages of cooking fires there has been Carbon-14 dated to roughly 7,000, 20,000, and 22,000 BCE.^[2]

Tabon Cave is named after the "Tabon Bird" (Tabon Scrubfowl, Megapodius cumingii), which deposited thick hard layers of guano during periods when the cave was uninhabited so that succeeding groups of tool-makers settled on a cement-like floor of bird dung. That the inhabitants were actually engaged in tool manufacture is indicated in that about half of the 3,000 recovered specimens examined are discarded cores of a material which had to be transported from some distance. The Tabon man fossils are considered to have come from a third group of inhabitants, who worked the cave between 22,000 and 20,000 BCE. An earlier cave level lies so far below the level containing cooking fire assemblages that it must represent Upper Pleistocene dates like 45 or 50 thousand years ago.^[2] Anthropologist Robert Fox, who directed the excavations, deduces that the Tabon cave was a habitation of man for a period of 40,000 years, from 50,000 to 9,000 years ago.^{[citation needed]}

Physical anthropologists who have examined the Tabon Man skullcap are agreed that it belonged to modern man, homo sapiens, as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene homo erectus species. This indicates that Tabon Man was Pre-Mongoloid (Mongoloid being the term anthropologists apply to the racial stock which entered Southeast Asia during the Holocene and absorbed earlier peoples to produce the modern Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, and "Pacific" peoples). Two experts have given the opinion that the mandible is "Australian" in physical type, and that the skullcap measurements are most nearly like the Ainus or Tasmanians. Nothing can be concluded about Tabon man's physical appearance from the recovered skull fragments except that he was not a Negrito.^[3]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Scott, William Henry (1984), Prehispanic Source Materials for the study of Philippine History, New Day Publishers, ISBN 971-10-0226-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=bR2XAQAACAAJ, retrieved 2008-08-05 .
• Zaide, Sonia M. (1999), The Philippines: A Unique Nation (Second ed.), All-Nations Publishing, ISBN 971-642-071-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=otdEGQAACAAJ .

[edit] Further reading

• Jocano, F. Landa (1975), Philippine Prehistory: An Anthropological Overview of the Beginnings of Filipino Society and Culture, Philippine Center for Advanced Studies, University of the Philippines System, http://books.google.com/books?id=xwriGAAACAAJ 

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