The ancient peoples of the Philippines and of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) may have built sophisticated boats and mastered seafaring tens of thousands of years ago—millennia before Magellan, Zheng He, and even the Polynesians were able to match their feats. In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Ateneo de Manila University researchers Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik challenge the widely-held contention that technological progress during the Paleolithic only emerged in Europe and Africa. The researchers pointed out that much of ISEA was never connected to mainland Asia, neither by land bridges nor by ice sheets. Yet it has yielded evidence of early human habitation, more than enough to establish that people reached these islands long ago. Evidence
