Was Homo luzonensis a seafarer?

The recent discovery of Homo luzonensis established the presence of a previously unknown hominin on the island of Luzon over 50,000 years ago. Indirect evidence found elsewhere on the island—stone tools and a butchered rhinoceros, but no actual hominin remains—pushes back human presence there much farther, to over 700,000 years ago.

But how did they get there?

“Luzon has always been an island,” asserts archaeologist Armand Mijares, co-lead researcher of the team that discovered H. luzonensis.

“To go to Luzon, you have to have an open sea crossing from the tip of Palawan to Mindoro to Luzon. Of course, you can also take a longer route via Borneo,” he said in a televised interview with Mark Salazar on Balitang Pilipinas Ngayon.

He stops short of saying that these hominins were already socially and technologically advanced enough to create seacraft, thousands of years ahead of their Homo sapiens cousins, though he doesn’t discount the possibility.

These ancient hominins may have populated Luzon by surviving some natural disaster—a tsunami or a flash flood, perhaps—by luckily clinging to driftwood. But Mijares thinks that a deliberate migration can’t be easily ruled out. 

“You need more than a couple of individuals to establish a stable population,” he notes. “So it could’ve been a deliberate migration.”

And if it was deliberate, then that suggests that our ancient cousins were socially and technologically sophisticated enough to set sail in groups on seacraft durable enough for the journey.

This isn’t the first time that scientists have proposed the possibility of the existence of seafaring technology thousands of years ahead of modern humans.

RELATED: What we know about Homo Luzonensis so far

A 2008 article in Discover Magazine entitled, “Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?” points to evidence of human activity on the shores of Willandra Lakes in Australia some 50,000 years ago despite the continent being surrounded by water. 

“By any route, you have to island-hop to Australia, with one water crossing greater than 44 miles,” University of Oregon anthropologist Jon Erlandson was quoted as saying.

“So it is a real exercise to get across, and the magnitude of that is illustrated by the fact that, before anatomically modern humans made the leap, no large-bodied animal ever got all the way across.”

Not everyone believes that seacraft were an absolute necessity, however.

In 2012, British researchers David Wilkinson and Graeme Ruxton concluded that waves of random castaways, even as little as one every 50 years, could help establish a sustainable population.

By its nature, ancient hominin seacraft technology may be difficult if not impossible to come by. But it remains a distinct possibility, and one that Mijares might, with enough luck, find evidence for in the future. —KBK, GMA News