Tabon Man

Tabon Man refers to remains discovered in the Tabon Caves in Lipuun Point in Quezon, Palawan in the Philippines. These were discovered by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum of the Philippines on May 28, 1962. These remains, the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, were believed to be the earliest human remains known in the Philippines which date back to 16,500 years ago, until a metatarsal from "Callao Man" discovered in 2007 was dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old. The Tabon 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.

The right mandible of a Homo sapien, which dates 29,000 BC, was discovered together with a skull-cap. The Tabon Skull Cap is considered the earliest skull cap of modern man found in the Philippines, and is said to have belonged to a young female. The Tabon Mandible is the earliest evidence of human remains showing archaic characteristics of mandible and teeth. The Tabon Tibia Fragment, a bone from the lower leg, was found during the re-excavation of the Tabon Cave by the National Museum of the Philippines. The bone was sent to the National Museum of Natural History in France to be studied. Accelerated carbon dating technique revealed a dating of 47,000 +/- 11-10,000 years ago, making it the oldest human fossil recovered in the complex.

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. About half of the 3,000 recovered specimens examined were discarded cores of a material which had to be transported from some distance. This indicates that the inhabitants were actually engaged in tool manufacture. 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 dates like 45 or 50 thousand years ago. Anthropologist Robert Fox, who directed the excavations, deduced that the Tabon Cave was a habitation of man for a period of 40,000 years, from 50,000 to 9,000 years ago.

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