Early humans in Philippines lived 700,000 years ago

PARIS - Were the early humans roaming east Asia more than half-a-million years ago clever enough to build seafaring watercraft and curious enough to cross a vast expanse of open sea?

This and other questions arise from the discovery in the Philippines of a butchered rhinoceros skeleton and the stone tools probably used to carve away its meat, researchers said on Wednesday.

The find pushes back the arrival of the first homo species on the island chain tenfold to 700,000 years ago, they reported in the journal Nature.