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People of the Negrito or Aeta, an Australo-Melanesian
race, were the principal peoples of the Philippine
archipelago. Negritos can be described as a generally
under five feet tall, dark skinned with tight and curly
brown hair. The Aeta are adapted locally to the
tropical jungles of the Philippines. They were a nomadic
hunting and gathering people who forage in small
family bands with an informal organization. They were
once widespread throughout the Philippines, but they are
to find now only in the remote highland areas of Luzon,
Palawan, Panay, Negros and Mindanao.
About 2,500 BC, a group of
Austronesian from Taiwan had ventured to northern Luzon
in the Philippines and settled there. The archaeological
result of the Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon is: They
had the same set of stone tools and pottery like in
Taiwan. For the most part, the Austronesians encountered
unoccupied coasts and islands. Where they met
hunting and gathering cultures, their horticultural
productivity and population growth soon overwhelmed the
aboriginal occupants. All the surviving Aeta populations
in the Philippines speak Austronesian languages. In the
Philippines there are some 40 Austronesian languages.
The five largest, Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon
and Bicolano.
Five separate emigrations of mongoloid groups
from Southeast Asia followed from about 1500 to 500 BC,
came to settle at the coastal areas, driving the earlier
settlers into the mountains. These emigrants brought
with them their iron tools and a technology that
included glassmaking and tie-and-dye weaving. Soon after
the Malayan people came from 500 BC up until the
early 13th century. They contributed greatly to Filipino
culture, and are the ancestors of all Filipino tribes
that exist today. The early centuries brought the metal
working, water buffalo, irrigation and wet rice field
agriculture spread through the archipelago. Whether
from India or mainland Indo-China, the source of these
agricultural and technical innovations is not known.
Chinese traders were known to have
been resident from about AD 1000, and some cultural
influences from Southeast Asia. The social and
political organization of the population in the widely
scattered islands evolved into a generally common
pattern. Only the permanent-field rice farmers of
northern Luzon had any concept of territoriality.
The basic unit of settlement was the barangay,
originally a kinship group headed by a datu*. Within the
barangay, the broad social divisions consisted of
nobles, including the datu; freemen; and a group
dependents.
Then the Ten Datus* from Sabah
were escaping from an overbearing presence of the Sultan
of Malacca on Borneo rather, than appropriating new
domains. Around 1380 they bought a piece of Panay from
the Negritos, and settled in the Visayas too. The
legend calls them "datus*", not Rajas or Sultans,
indicates they were Austronesian chiefs and not the
heads of politically organized states.
The accomplishments of the
datus*:
Datu Sumakwel divided the
islands among three other datus*.
Datu Kalantiaw created a code for the people to live by.
Datu Lapu-Lapu killed Magellan.
The Islam brought the gunpowder, firearms and cannon.
Recalling how smartly the Sultan of Malacca accepted the
new faith and how quickly others followed his lead,
access to the new weapons may have been restricted to
the faithful. The religion's rapid progress through
the islands may have been, at least in part, an arms
race. They began to establish what became a powerful
Islamic sphere of influence over the next hundred years.
datu* = chief
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