The Late Pleistocene to early Holocene foragers of northern Luzon

Recent excavation in Callao Cave, one of the penablanca caves (Mijares 2005), has given us the earliest securely dated site in Luzon, at c. 25,000 BP. Two other Holocene period cave sites (Dalan Serkot and Eme) were excavated. Evidence from faunal identification. macrobotanical and phytolith analyses has shed some insight on thhe environment and diet of these early foragers. Thee lithic analysis shows some changes in lithic technology from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene. The reconstruction of subsistence strategy shows continuing broad diet subsistence from the Late Pleistocene to the mid Holocene. This differs from previous models) for northern Luzon proposed by Peterson (1974) and Thiel (1980). The results of this study also show the probability that hunter-gatherers foraged and survived in the interior tropical rainforest without the support of agriculturists, as earlier proposed by Headland and Bailey (1989).