Nick Al Francis L.

Bunda BS EMC 1-A

The Tabon Cave Complex and all of Lipuun Point is located on the west coast of Palawan.  It is
located on a limestone promontory which is visible from any direction for many kilometers and
honeycombed with at least 200 caves and rockshelters.  This point is called Lipuun by the local people
but marked "Abion Head" on charts made from British surveys in 1851.  The point is about 104 hectares
in are and is formed by a number of rounded limestone domes separated by deep chasms. 

These caves contained an astonishing wealth and an extensive time-range of cultural materials: a
flake tool tradition which dates from the Late Pleistocene and early post-Pleistocene periods including a
highly developed jar burial complex which appeared during the Late Neolithic and continued on to the
developed Metal Age; and finally, porcelains and stoneware indicating local trade with China during the
Song and Yuan Dynasties. The excavations have revealed more than 50,000 years of Philippine
prehistory and; south and East Asian relationships.

The discovery of the human fossil was made by a National Museum team headed by the late Dr.
Robert B. Fox. The fossil is composed of the skull cap, or the frontal skull bone, two fragments of jaw
bones and some teeth. The set of fossils suggest that are at least three individuals. The skull cap is that
of a young individual, probably female.
   
   The fossils were found in a cave in Lipuun Point in the Municipality of Quezon, Palawan. The cave
faces the South China Sea and is located on the western face of the limestone cliff, one among the more
than thirty caves found in that rock outcropping. The cave was named Tabon after the large-footed bird
that lays eggs in huge holes it digs into cave floors, many of which have been found in the cave. The
mouth is about 33 meters above the sea level. A curious fact is that there is no signs of any sea shells in
the cave floor deposits. This is because during that time of occupation by Tabon Man the sea coast was
about thirty kilometers away since the sea did not reach its present level until about eleven to seven
thousand years ago. The layer where the fossils of the Tabon Man was found has been dated to 22 to 23
thousand years old, which also gives the age of the fossils.
     
The Tabon Cave, in fact, was populated by peoples earlier than Tabon Man, since stone tools
were there again to prove this , this type of tools found in the Tabon Cave actually continued to be in
use in other sites in the Lipuun Point even after Tabon Cave was abandoned. In fact, this type of tools
continued to be in use even to recent times among certain peoples. There are a number of archeological
sites in the Philippines that have this kind of tools together with tools of later kind. In Lipuun Point, one
of the more important of these sites is the Guri Cave. This cave was a place where people lived. This
cave contained a layer of soil that contained the garbage left by the people which was composed mostly
of marine shells. This layer was dated between 5000 and 2000 years B.C., and was found to contain flake
tools, bones of animals like the wild pig, deer and others. This cave was used by people at the time when
the sea reached its present level which brought the coastline right at Lipuun Point.
     
Another difference with Tabon Cave was that the stone tools from Guri were made from rock
cores that have been previously prepared before flaking off an intended tool, which produced stone
tools with shapes that are repeated – a method that cannot be done with cores that were not prepared.

Archaeologists and anthropologists continue to dig in the caves, which have been dubbed the
Philippines’ Cradle of Civilization due to the huge number of discoveries that have been made there.
However, so far only 29 of the 215 caves that are known to make up this cave system have actually been
explored. Despite this, the discovery of the Tabon Man and the implications it has on the plotting of
human history has been so great that the cave complex has already been added to the tentative list of
the Philippines for future UNESCO World Heritage Site nominations.