The oldest archaic human remains in the Philippines are the "Callao Man" specimens

discovered in 2007 in the Callao Cave in Northern Luzon. They were dated in 2010
through uranium-series dating to the Late Pleistocene, c. 67,000 years old. The remains
were initially identified as modern human, but after the discovery of more specimens in
2019, they have been reclassified as being members of a new species – Homo luzonensis.
[82][83]
The oldest indisputable modern human (Homo sapiens) remains in the Philippines are the
"Tabon Man" fossils discovered in the Tabon Caves in the 1960s by Robert B. Fox,
an anthropologist from the National Museum. These were dated to the Paleolithic, at
around 26,000 to 24,000 years ago. The Tabon Cave complex also indicates that the
caves were inhabited by humans continuously from at least 47,000 ± 11,000 years ago
to around 9,000 years ago.[84][85] The caves were also later used as a burial site by
unrelated Neolithic and Metal Age cultures in the area.[86]

Migration of the sea-faring Austronesian peoples and

their languages. The Negritos are descendants of one of the earliest groups of
modern humans to reach the Philippines

The Tabon Cave remains (along with the Niah Cave remains of Borneo and the Tam Pa
Ling remains of Laos) are part of the "First Sundaland People", the earliest branch
of anatomically modern humans to reach Island Southeast Asia via the Sundaland land bridge.
They entered the Philippines from Borneo via Palawan at around 50,000 to 40,000 years
ago. Their descendants are collectively known as the Negrito people, although they are
highly genetically divergent from each other. Philippine Negritos show a high degree
of Denisovan Admixture, similar to Papuans and Indigenous Australians, in contrast to
Malaysian and Andamanese Negritos (the Orang Asli). This indicates that Philippine
Negritos, Papuans, and Indigenous Australians share a common ancestor that admixed
with Denisovans at around 44,000 years ago.[87] Negritos comprise around 0.03% of the
total Philippine population today, they include ethnic groups like the Aeta (including the
Agta, Arta, Dumagat, etc.) of Luzon, the Ati of Western Visayas, the Batak of Palawan, and
the Mamanwa of Mindanao. Today they comprise just 0.03% of the total Philippine
population.[88]
After the Negritos, were two early Paleolithic migrations from East Asian (basal Austric,
an ethnic group which includes Austroasiatics) people, they entered the Philippines at
around 15,000 and 12,000 years ago, respectively. Like the Negritos, they entered the
Philippines via the Sundaland land bridge in the last ice age. They retain partial genetic
signals among the Manobo people and the Sama-Bajau people of Mindanao.[89]
The last wave of prehistoric migrations to reach the Philippines was the Austronesian
expansion which started in the Neolithic at around 4,500 to 3,500 years ago, when a
branch of Austronesians from Taiwan (the ancestral Malayo-Polynesian-speakers) migrated
to the Batanes Islands and Luzon. They spread quickly throughout the rest of the islands
of the Philippines and became the dominant ethnolinguistic group. They admixed with
the earlier settlers, resulting in the modern Filipinos – which though predominantly
genetically Austronesian still show varying genetic admixture with Negritos (and vice
versa for Negrito ethnic groups which show significant Austronesian admixture). [90]
[91] Austronesians possessed advanced sailing technologies and colonized the
Philippines via sea-borne migration, in contrast to earlier groups. [92][93]

Maritime Jade Road, connecting the Philippines to its neighbors

Austronesians from the Philippines also later settled Guam and the other islands
of Maritime Southeast Asia, and parts of Mainland Southeast Asia. From there, they
colonized the rest of Austronesia, which in modern times include Micronesia, coastal New
Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar, in addition to Maritime Southeast
Asia and Taiwan.[93][94]
The connections between the various Austronesian peoples have also been known since
the colonial era due to shared material culture and linguistic similarities of various peoples
of the islands of the Indo-Pacific, leading to the designation of Austronesians as the
"Malay race" (or the "Brown race") during the age of scientific racism by Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach.[95][96][97] Due to the colonial American education system in the early 20th
century, the term "Malay race" is still used incorrectly in the Philippines to refer to the
Austronesian peoples, leading to confusion with the non-indigenous Melayu people.[98][99]
[100][101]
Archaic epoch (to 1565)Edit
Since at least the 3rd century, various ethnic groups established several communities.
These were formed by the assimilation of various native Philippine kingdoms. [88] South
Asian and East Asian people together with the people of the Indonesian archipelago and
the Malay Peninsula, traded with Filipinos and introduced Hinduism and Buddhism to the
native tribes of the Philippines. Most of these people stayed in the Philippines where
they were slowly absorbed into local societies.
Many of the barangay (tribal municipalities) were, to a varying extent, under the de
jure jurisprudence of one of several neighboring empires, among them
the Malay Srivijaya, Javanese Majapahit, Brunei, Malacca, Tamil Chola, Champa and Khmer
empires, although de facto had established their own independent system of rule. Trading
links with Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Cambodia, Malay
Peninsula, Indochina, China, Japan, India and Arabia. A thalassocracy had thus emerged
based on international trade.
Even scattered barangays, through the development of inter-island and international
trade, became more culturally homogeneous by the 4th century. Hindu-Buddhist culture
and religion flourished among the noblemen in this era.
In the period between the 7th to the beginning of the 15th centuries, numerous
prosperous centers of trade had emerged, including the Kingdom of Namayan which
flourished alongside Manila Bay,[102][103] Cebu, Iloilo,[104] Butuan, the Kingdom
of Sanfotsi situated in Pangasinan, the Kingdom of Luzon now known as Pampanga which
specialized in trade with most of what is now known as Southeast Asia and with China,
Japan and the Kingdom of Ryukyu in Okinawa.
From the 9th century onwards, a large number of Arab traders from the Middle East
settled in the Malay Archipelago and intermarried with the local Malay, Bruneian,
Malaysian, Indonesian and Luzon and Visayas indigenous populations.[105]
In the years leading up to 1000 AD, there were already several maritime societies
existing in the islands but there was no unifying political state encompassing the entire
Philippine archipelago. Instead, the region was dotted by numerous semi-
autonomous barangays (settlements ranging in size from villages to city-states) under
the sovereignty of competing thalassocracies ruled by datus, rajahs or sultans[106] or by
upland agricultural societies ruled by "petty plutocrats". States such as the Wangdoms
of Ma-i and Pangasinan, Kingdom of Maynila, Namayan, the Kingdom of Tondo,
the Kedatuans of Madja-as and Dapitan, the Rajahnates of Butuan and Cebu and the
sultanates of Maguindanao, Lanao and Sulu existed alongside the highland societies of
the Ifugao and Mangyan.[107][108][109][110] Some of these regions were part of the Malayan
empires of Srivijaya, Majapahit and Brunei.[111][112][113]