Philippine prehistory covers the events prior to the written history of what would become the Philippine archipelago. The current demarcation line between this period and the early history of the Philippines is 900 AD, which is the date of the first surviving written record to come from the Philippines, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription. This period saw the immense change that took hold of the archipelago from Stone Age culturens in the 4th century, continuing on with the gradual widening of trade until 900 and the first surviving written records.
THE STONE AGE
The first evidence of the systematic use of Stone-Age technologies in the Philippines is estimated to have dated back to about 50,000 BC, and this phase in the development of proto-Philippine societies is considered to end with the rise of metal tools in about 500 BC, although stone tools continued to be used past that date. Filipino Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano refers to the earliest noticeable stage in the development of proto-Philippine societies as the Formative Phase. He also identified stone tool and ceramics making as the two core industries that defined the economic activity of the time, and which shaped the means by which early Filipinos adapted to their environment during this period.
About 30,000 BC, the Negritos, who became the ancestors of today's Aetas, or Aboriginal Filipinos, descended from more northerly abodes in Central Asia passing through the Indian Subcontinent and reaching the Andamanese Islands. From thereon, the Negritos continued to venture on land bridges reaching Southeast Asia. While some of the Negritos settled in Malaysia, becoming what is now the Orang Asli people, several Negrito tribes continued on to the Philippines through Borneo. No evidence has survived which would indicate details of Ancient Filipino life such as their crops, color, and architecture. Philippine historian William Henry Scott points out any theory which describes such details is therefore a pure hypothesis and should be honestly presented as such.
migration theories
There have been several models of early human migration to the Philippines. Since H. Otley Beyer first proposed his wave migration theory, numerous scholars have approached the question of how, when and why humans first came to the Philippines. The question of whether the first humans arrived from the south (Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei as suggested by Beyer) or from the north (via Taiwan as suggested by the Austronesian theory) has been a subject of heated debate for decades. As new discoveries come to light, past hypotheses are reevaluated and new theories constructed.
Beyer's wave migration theory
The first, and most widely known theory of the prehistoric peopling of the Philippines is that of H. Otley Beyer, founder of the Anthropology Department of the University of the Philippines. According to Dr. Beyer, the ancestors of the Filipinos came to the islands first via land bridges which would occur during times when the sea level was low, and then later in seagoing vessels such as the balangay. Thus he differentiated these ancestors as arriving in different "waves of migration", as follows:
"Dawn Man", a cave-man type who was similar to Java man, Peking Man, and other Asian homo sapiens of 250,000 years ago. The aboriginal pygmy group, the Negritos, who arrived between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago. The seafaring tool-using Indonesian group who arrived about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and were the first immigrants to reach the Philippines by sea. The seafaring, more civilized Malays who brought the Iron age culture and were the real colonizers and dominant cultural group in the pre-Hispanic Philippines.
Beyer's theory, while still popular among lay Filipinos, has been generally been disputed by anthropologists and historians. Reasons for doubting it are founded on Beyer's use of 19th century scientific methods of progressive evolution and migratory diffusion as the basis for his hypothesis. These methods have since been proven to be too simple and unreliable to explain the prehistoric peopling of the Philippines.