PEOPLE

      The Philippines is an ancient land that had a unique culture and society long before there was western contact. The unspoilt culture however, has remained undiscovered. The Filipino heritage is a potential source of nationalistic pride, just waiting to be tapped and revealed. Just how long have we lived is implied by a digging done by Robert Fox at 121 centimeters of the Tabon Caves revealed a habitation level containing charcoal dated by radiocarbon-14 to 30,000 years ago-long before man inhabited the Americas and the New World.
     Theories about the prehistoric period vary. Since prehistorians depend heavily on artifacts and other finds, it is difficult to come up with one perfect theory. Dr. Eusebio Dizon of the Philippine National Museum says that with less than ten percent of artifacts dug up, we have a long way to go before we could give a single theory about the prehistoric man and his surroundings. While we indeed know that the first people were hunters, followed by agriculturists who decided to settle instead of being nomadic, questions about details remain unanswered. Questions like what kind of animals did the hunters hunt? What kind of food did the gatherers gather? What crops did the agriculturists plant? And what, specifically, did the ancient man eat? These questions, unfortunately remain unanswered, as it is not easy to look for the answers to them. In Dr. Dizon's words, the artifacts cannot speak for themselves.
      The division of periods as well as the span each period covers differ among many archeologists and anthropologists. Among the theories that will be discussed here are those by Robert Fox, Otley Beyer, and Wilhelm Solheim II. Another theory by Landa Jocano, one in which Solheim's theory is based, will be discussed briefly. But regardless of the theories, facts remain the same: the earliest traces of Philippine prehistoic man and their tools are found in Palawan, at the mouth of the South China Sea. A group of caves called the Tabon Caves is perhaps every archeologist's utopia in the Philippines. Tools from different periods in prehistory have been dug up in the said sites. How long ago the tools were or how long ago the men and animals whose traces have been found lived is learned through a complex process of analyzing the finds. Unfortunately, the Philippines currently does not have the equipment needed to analyze these finds. The artifacts and fossils are sent to another country for analysis then sent back to the Philippines after determining essential things like the age and the composition of the finds.
      Why in Palawan? Robert Fox offers an explanation in his series of lectures at the National Museum (Fox, 1967). According to him, Palawan is the perfect corridor that bridged the Philippine Islands and Borneo. Looking at Palawan's geographical location and physical appearance, it is not so hard to imagine that it used to connect the Philippines with nearby islands. In fact, it is even earer to Borneo than it is to other parts of the country, say Mindanao, or Cebu.
     In the island, the Tabon Caves hold the place of distinction as being the place where some of the oldest artifacts that tell silent tales about prehistoric Philippines were dug up from there. It is located in the southwest coast of Palawan and is relatively an isolated place as there are few inhabitants of the area even at present. It holds deposits from 6 to 8 meters deep.
     The Tabon Caves, however, are only few of the caves found in the island. Presently located at the mouth of the South China Sea, these caves surprisingly show no fossils of shell and other marine fossils along with the other findings in the cave during the Paleolithic era, suggesting that it used to be part of a stretch of land. This is, accodring to Mr. Paniza, a geologist, because during that period, the Tabon Caves were located 35 kilometers from the sea during the Ice Age because glaciers from the North hemisphere absorbed a sizable amount of the sea's water. Thus, the sea was too far from the caves for man to gather shellfish and other seafood.
     With so little of the artifacts and fossils being recovered, little is known about our forefathers. while this is mostly due to the fact that it takes a long time to excavate sites, looters who dig up the artifacts to sell them to collectors also help in making the task of knowing more about philippine prehistory more difficult. Archeological context is highly essential in being able to analyze finds. Collectors can only show the artifcats, but can never give the correct context. Artifacts that have fallen in the hands of the collectors are as god as those never found, because when out of context, they are dumb and could not tell their tales.

TM