A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines

Florent Détroit (), Armand Salvador Mijares (), Julien Corny, Guillaume Daver, Clément Zanolli, Eusebio Dizon, Emil Robles, Rainer Grün and Philip J. Piper
Additional contact information
Florent Détroit: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7194, CNRS, Musée de l’Homme
Armand Salvador Mijares: University of the Philippines
Julien Corny: Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR 7194, CNRS, Musée de l’Homme
Guillaume Daver: Université de Poitiers
Clément Zanolli: Université de Bordeaux
Eusebio Dizon: National Museum of the Philippines
Emil Robles: University of the Philippines
Rainer Grün: Griffith University
Philip J. Piper: National Museum of the Philippines

Nature, 2019, vol. 568, issue 7751, 181-186

Abstract: Abstract A hominin third metatarsal discovered in 2007 in Callao Cave (Northern Luzon, the Philippines) and dated to 67 thousand years ago provided the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Philippines. Analysis of this foot bone suggested that it belonged to the genus Homo, but to which species was unclear. Here we report the discovery of twelve additional hominin elements that represent at least three individuals that were found in the same stratigraphic layer of Callao Cave as the previously discovered metatarsal. These specimens display a combination of primitive and derived morphological features that is different from the combination of features found in other species in the genus Homo (including Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens) and warrants their attribution to a new species, which we name Homo luzonensis. The presence of another and previously unknown hominin species east of the Wallace Line during the Late Pleistocene epoch underscores the importance of island Southeast Asia in the evolution of the genus Homo.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1067-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:568:y:2019:i:7751:d:10.1038_s41586-019-1067-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1067-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().