About 709,000 years ago, a group of ancient humans used stone tools to butcher a dead rhino on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The find means our hominin cousins reached the Philippines much earlier than we previously knew.

The discovery may also throw new light on the origins of the mysterious “ hobbits ”: tiny hominins that once inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores .

Researchers have long wondered whether Luzon was colonised by an ancient species of human deep in antiquity.

In 2010, researchers working on …