Modern humans in the Philippines colonization, subsistence and new insights into behavioural complexity

The Philippines consist of 7,107 islands located at the northern limits of Wallacea and the northeastern fringes of the islands of Southeast Asia at latitude 13 o N and longitude 122 o E. It is separated from Borneo to the southwest by the Sulu Sea, from Mainland Southeast Asia to the northwest by the South China Sea, from Taiwan to the north by the Luzon Strait and from Sulawesi to the south by the Celebes Sea, and it is bounded to the east by the Philippine Sea.The Philippine archipelago straddles two distinct biogeographic zones, with Palawan located on the northeastern edge of the Sunda Shelf, and hence shares a fauna and l ora with many of its closest relatives within Island Southeast Asia (Madulid 1998). A posited land bridge either in the Upper Pleistocene (Fox 1970; Cranbrook 2000) or more likely in the Middle Pleistocene (Heaney 1985; Pawlik & Ronquillo 2003) possibly facilitated the colonization of the island by Sundaic Island species, including perhaps hominins. The main archipelago islands of Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao, situated in Wallacea, on the other hand, have never been physically linked to the Sundaic region, and a sea crossing has always been needed to reach them (Heaney 1993; Oliver & Heaney 1996; Esseltyn et al. 2010).