The Philippines and Its People

Family of Negritoes - Photo Credit: Compton Encyclopedia 1931 Edition

Archeological evidence suggests that the Negritos, a broad term for indigenous people of dark complexions, reached the Philippines over 30,000 years ago by a land bridge from the Asian mainland following the migration of animals. Excavation at Palawan’s Tabon cave yielded a human skull carbon-dated to 22,000 B.C. About 10,000 years ago, the ice melted, the sea level rose and the land bridges disappeared.

Waves of Indonesians followed by sea from 3,000 BC, and Malays got a firm foothold around 200 BC, followed in later centuries by waves of Chinese settlers. Most of today’s Filipinos have grown out of intermarriages between indigenous and Malay people. Modern Filipino culture, including language and cuisine, was heavily influenced by the Malays, who also introduced arts, literature, and a system of government.

A few centuries before the Spanish reached the Philippines in the 16th century, Filipinos involved in trade had also met Arabs and Hindus from India, while the expanding Chinese population wielded considerable commerical power. Muslim clergy start to bring Islam to the Philippines from Indonesia and Malaya via Borneo in the late 14^th century.

The Philippine population is a mix of tribal and ethnic groups representing 111 linguistic, cultural and racial groups. The majority is of Filipino-Malayan descent with Japanese, Chinese, European and American added to the mix. The minority is the aboriginal group called Negritos whose average height is about 58 inches, dark brown to almost black skin color, wide noses and tight curly hair. The Negritos or Little Negroes are one of the dwarf Australoid people of the ancient populations of the world. It is believed that inland forest situations with very few proteins and steep terrain contributed to their short stature. They kept to the deep forests while the Igorots kept to the mountains. They have survived because of their secluded location. The Negritoes survived by hunting and fishing and eventually had adopted a rudimentary form of farming. Local groups were composed of five to ten families living in a group of thatched lean-tos around a circular space. The leader of the band was determined by age or consensus. The group moved frequently for economic reasons or because of deaths, feeling of ill luck or quarrels. They have their own distinct language.

There are about 87 different languages and dialects spoken in the Philippines. Tagalog was made the national language in 1946. Tagalog was changed to Pilipino in 1962. Most of my generation still call it Tagalog. English is also widely used. Some young people nowadays used Taglish which is a mixture of both Tagalog and English in their conversation.

The Philippines is a conglomeration of various cultures due to the influence of different civilizations over the past 1500 years. Perhaps because of their over three centuries of Spanish rule, the Filipinos are passionate about life in a way that seems more Latin than Asian and because of their 48 years under the American administration, they can communicate easily in English and have been great imitators of American culture.

In spite of new influence from neighboring Asian countries, culture from the first settlers still remain. These include belief in the active powers of spirits and the importance of omens. Spirits once played an important part in the lives of all Filipinos, and many who have been converted to Christianity or the Muslim faith still retain a few of their ancient beliefs. The Igorots still worship their ancient gods, the highest of them is called Diwata. The Philippines is the only predominantly Christian nation in Asia.

The Philippines has been ruled by various Asian and western empires. From 200 to 1565 AD, part of the Philippines may have been ruled by Hindu-Malay empires, the Javanese Madjapahit empire and the Ming Dynasty of China. From 1440 to 1565, the northern Luzon was controlled by the Japanese and Borneo and Brunei controlled the south.

Until 3,000 years ago, contact with the outside world was minimal. Between 1500 BC and 1440 AD, the Philippines traded with Borneo, Indonesia, Japan, Persia, India and China who made the Philippines their base of operation. The earliest known trade with China occurred during the T’ang Dynasty (618 to 906 AD), although contacts did not become extensive until the Sung Dynasty (960 to 1279), Yuan Dynasty (1260 to 1368), and Ming Dynasty (14^th to 16^th centuries). Records show that the Chinese name the Philippines largest island “Liu sung” which became Luzon later on. Historian says that the name Visayas was derived from Swirijaya, the Indo-Malay Empire that ruled Sumatra from the 7^th to 13th centuries. 

Here is something to entertain you from young Filipinos at UCLA dancing the Philippine native dance called Tinikling.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WLfqDMwA_o]
The Tinikling is a pre-Spanish folk dance inspired by the tikling (heron) bird. The steps imitate the movement of the bird as they walk between grass stems and tree branches escaping the bamboo traps set by farmers.

It is the best performance I have seen so far. Watch those feet while they dance with blindfolds. Enjoy.

Until next time. The Philippine story continues.

Rosalinda

Sources:

Philippine Guide by Jill and Rebecca Gale de Villa

Philippine Handbook by Carl Parkes

Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia

Has Anyone Mistaken You For A Famous Person?

I received an email from someone asking for donation regarding the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington DC on Monday, May 27, 2019 of which he will be the Marshal. My husband being a WWII veteran I sent in a donation in his honor and also because of who sent me the email which brings me to this topic of mistaken identity.

The person soliciting the donation is no other than Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame coach. Since I have never been a football fan, I didn’t know who Lou Holtz was years ago until my husband told me a story when he came home after my son’s soccer game when my son was in grade school.

One of the kids watching the game called his father and said, “Look Dad, there is Lou Holtz.”

A lot of people have mistaken my husband with Lou Holtz. I have no idea how tall Lou Holtz is but my husband is 6’ tall and blond. He used to be reddish blond. I see Lou Holtz is also blond.

When we moved to Charleston, we were at the Charleston Market downtown having a quick snack and people stopped and asked if he was Lou Holtz. He denied it but people did not believe him.

The first time we went to dinner at Hyman Restaurant downtown, we saw a picture of Lou Holtz on the wall. I noticed people stared at my husband and then looked at the wall.

Then when my stepdaughter and her husband together with my three granddaughters came one summer, we took them to Hyman. Lou Holtz’s picture was one of the pictures posted along the stairway. They seated us on a table near the stairway. On the table was carved “Lou Holtz sat here.” I didn’t know if it was intentional or a coincidence that we were seated at that table.

Another time, we were waiting in line outside for a table and the waitress asked for our name and our guests having known the story said, “Holtz like in Lou Holtz.” When they called Lou Holtz, we were taken to the bar and there was a picture of Lou Holtz at one corner of the bar. Customers at the bar looked at my husband and then at the wall and asked if he was Lou Holtz and he said no. They didn’t believe him. When our bill came at the end of our dinner, our guests picked up the tab so the restaurant did not know if he was Lou Holtz or not.

The last time we were at Hyman with my son and his girlfriend, the same thing happened. It was hilarious to the point of totally out of control. It was the worst in my opinion. Two people addressed him as Lou Holtz and asked for my husband’s autograph. They even asked to have their pictures taken with him. It did not make sense to me because Lou Holtz was supposed to broadcast a game the same day in another city. He could not possibly be in Charleston at the same time. People were not thinking.

A waiter must have tipped the owner of the restaurant because he came over to our table and thanked my husband profusely for coming and bringing some friends. I think he really believed he was Lou Holtz. I could not wait to get out of the restaurant. My son paid the bill so it was still a mystery to the restaurant if he was really Lou Holtz. My son’s girlfriend suggested my husband should study Lou Holtz’s biography so he could answer questions intelligently to make it look real. I said, “No!”.

I don’t think I’ll ever set foot at Hyman Restaurant again. At least not with my husband. Of course, with his health condition right now, he can’t go anywhere so that solves that problem.

Will the real Lou Holtz please stand up?

 

Philippines' Early History - Human Migration

The Philippines was once a part of mainland Asia. The first sign of man in the Philippines dates back to at least 35,000 years ago. Since prehistoric times, the islands have been populated by peoples of the Malay race. Most of them lived simply in scattered villages at river mouths. Their houses were made of bamboo and palm-thatch and they grew rice and fished for a living.

The Australoid Negritos from Borneo was the first group of people to reach the Philippines. The pigmy blacks, the Negritos or “Little Negroes”, one of the most diminutive peoples in the world, were nomadic hunters armed only with bows and arrows and blow guns and settled in Luzon, Palawan, Mindoro and Mindanao. Like the African negro, they have crispy hair and wide noses. They rarely attain a stature of five feet, and seldom live to be 50 years old. For the most part, they were true savages, building no houses, and depending chiefly on the game they kill with their bows and arrows. Being of a timid disposition, the negritoes kept to the deep forests, where they were driven by the Malays, and gave little trouble.

After the Negritos, the next wave of immigrants came by sea from Indonesia 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. They were people of the Early New Stone Age, followed by Late Neolithic group between 1,500 BC and 500 BC. The third wave of immigrants who came between 800 BC and 500 BC from southern China and Indochina introduced copper and bronze tools, copper mining and irrigated rice culture.

The domestication of animals and the beginnings of agriculture marked the Neolithic period (4,000 BC to 250 BC). Neolithic refers to those cultures which do not have metal artifacts though the Late Neolithic culture overlaps the Early Bronze age (800 BC to 250 BC). Pottery appeared in the Philippines by about 3,000 BC. In the Province of Batangas, there is evidence of nephrite artifacts ranging from needles and chisels, cylindrical and disc-shaped beads, spearheads, axe-like pendants, bracelets and beads, bronze objects, arrowheads and miniature bells.

The Igorots, a word coined by the Spaniards meaning “people of the mountains” were the mountain tribes from the Ifugao province. The Igorots and allied tribes were more savage people, who kept to the mountains as persistently as the Negritoes to the forests. They were found chiefly in Central Luzon, where they tilled the steep hillsides by a laborious method of terracing. They developed a way of life as varied and unique as the plants and animals that they followed.

One of the mountain tribes, the Ifugaos, built the fabled rice terraces out of the rugged mountainsides at Banawe thousands or maybe even millions years ago. It is believed that the Ifugaos have lived in the mountains since ancient times. A recent archaeological discovery supported that claim when an ancient stone wall, up to two meters thick and five meters high was found together with ancient tools that were dated to about 2,000 B.C. Carved from the steep hillsides, the rice terraces rise layer after layer like huge broad staircases to heaven. It is believed that if all the terraces were placed end to end, they would stretch more than half way around the world.

The spectacular rice terraces were a marvelous feat of engineering built by brilliant minds of years past who thought of ideas to help them survive with things available at their disposal. This was how these mountain tribes made use of every inch of space to survive. Since there was no flat land in the mountain provinces where the aborigines could cultivate food, the Ifugaos were skillful and ingenious and possessed this keen determination to survive and patiently undertook the monumental task of building this marvelous wonder of the world to cover the whole mountainsides from riverbed to the summit using only manual labor and rudimentary tools. They lived on house terraces in small villages. They carried rocks and stones up the mountains, dug into the bedrocks and built walls from mud and irrigation system where water passed through sluices that regulated its flow from top terraces to lower terraces so they could use them for rice paddies. These protecting walls were built, one above another, to retain the water and hold the precious soil in place so it will not be washed away by the tropical rains. This ancient wonder was compared to the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China except the rice terraces are assumed to be constructed voluntarily whereas the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China were constructed by slave labor.

From the Malay Peninsula came three waves of migration: between 300 BC and 100 BC, between AD 200 and AD 1200, and during the 14^th and 15^th centuries. These groups introduced useful discoveries in tools, weapons, textiles, weaving, pottery and new methods of farming. One group possessed an alphabet and became involved in trade with India, China and Indochina.

The Hindus reached the Philippines during the 4^th century BC and their influence was felt on the islands of Mindanao, the Visayas, Palawan and Mindoro. Trade with China began during the 9^th century. They gave Filipinos porcelain ware, silks and glass beads in exchange for sandalwood and other goods.

On Palawan Island live a group of people with light complexion and long hair. They exist in primitive fashion, and their food consists of local animals from the mountain areas and fish caught in the streams. They are ferocious race, prepared to go to any length to keep their privacy. Very little is known of their origins or ancestry. Some people say that this tribe is one of the so-called “lost tribes of Israel” and they have certainly been in the Philippines for a very long time.

When the Chinese and the Arab traders visited the coasts of Luzon centuries ago, they found some Igorots and other original tribes living on the shore. As foreigners began to settle in Luzon, the tribes reluctant to mix with them moved farther inland and high into the mountains. The mountain tribes live in much the same way as they did thousands of years ago. Though they live in high, cold regions, they do not wear many clothes. They usually wear a brief loincloth of finely hand-woven cotton, decorated with intricate, colorful designs. At home, they stay close to a fire for warmth but outside they move actively to keep warm.

In 1275, a group from Java came to the Philippines from the Sulu Archipelago to as far as Luzon. They stayed for 20 years and then left. By the middle of the 14^th century, Cambodia and Indo-China were trading porcelain in northern Philippines.

All these contacts brought changes to the Filipino way of life.

  

Sources:

Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia

Philippines Traveler’s Companion by Kirsten Ellis

The Philippines by John Cockcroft

The Ice Age - Part 2

By scientificamerican.com

During the glacial or ice age periods, the sea level was lowered because the ice sheets were formed upon the surface of the land. The huge ice sheets contained a considerable portion of the earth’s water. Much land was formed providing land bridges between continents for human and animal migrations permitting extensive interchange of faunas of North America and Eurasia.

The ice sheets made profound changes in the landscape and physical features of the regions it covered. The ice, which encroached gradually on regions previously warm, must have submitted all living things to new and unsettling conditions. In consequence some animals became extinct at this time, others moved southward.

When sea levels sank during the last Ice Age, a series of land bridges cut through the shallow waters connecting the Philippines with the rest of the Southeast Asia, one running through Palawan and Mindoro to Luzon, another through the Sulu Islands to Mindanao. Others linked Celebes with Mindanao. An even older land bridge connected northern Philippines with Taiwan at a time when that island was itself connected to the Asian mainland.

In between the time of glacial or ice age were periods of more moderate climatic conditions called the interglacials which were the times when the sea level rose due to the melting ice.

Human migration during the period 35,000 BC to 10,000 BC followed the migration of fauna and flora using these land bridges which connected the Philippines with the rest of Southeast Asia onto the new grassy plains until melting ice and rising sea levels submerged these land bridges 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. For thousands of years, bands of early hunters kept pushing farther and farther out into the new land.

In around 10,000 years BC, a change began to occur. Temperature began to rise and the ice sheets began to melt, gradually. Little by little rivers and lakes formed here and there. Decades past, centuries past and the ice slowly melt and the sea started to rise. With the flow and ebb of the water due to the melting ice caps, humans got isolated for scores of generations. Necessity dictated that they adapt to the new surroundings or they died. When the great ice sheets melted, the land bridges were submerged by rising waters, leaving the islands exposed.

After the Ice age, parts of the Asia mainland sank and the peaks remained surrounded by the waters of the China Sea.

Until next time. The story of the Philippines continues . . .

Rosalinda

The Ice Age - Part I

About two million years ago, the land was already formed. One large land area reached out into the Pacific Ocean from the Asian continent. Only the South China, Sulu and Celebes basins remained as seas. But events were taking shape in the earth’s polar region, causing three successive ice ages which lowered sea levels by 100 meters (330 feet). Sheets of ice were forming over the vast areas of the middle latitude of the North American continent and over much of northwestern Eurasia. From these areas, the ice seems to have moved out slowly in all directions, but mostly southward. The ice sheets were formed from snow, which must have fallen in great quantities when the climate was not warm enough to melt it. The ice was so thick that only the highest mountain peaks were visible about it.

  Photo by freegreatpicture.com

The ice age consisted of several glacial epochs, separated by epochs of milder climate during which the ice sheets were reduced or disappeared all together. During the last 65,000,000 years of Earth history, the Earth began a slow cooling period as early as 30,000,000 years ago during the Cenozoic Era, followed by the Pleistocene Epoch. The Pleistocene Epoch is the geological span of time that began 2,500,000 years ago and ended with the last glacial epoch some 10,000 years ago, with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch.

During the Pleistocene Epoch, great changes were taking place on the continents with the melting of the ice at least four or five times producing vast quantities of water which formed into lakes wherever basins were present. It also left a thick deposit of debris, called “drift” on the surface which it had covered. The drift consisted of rocks and earthly debris which the ice had scraped and broken off from the land over which it passed. The uneven spreading of the drift and the erosion of the ice left many depressions without outlets in the surface and in these depressions lakes, ponds, and marshes were formed of the large areas where once were covered by ice sheets. Thus arose most of the lakes, ponds, and marshes of the great area of millions of square miles covered by the ice sheets of North America.

  Photo by bhart9070

In addition to the lakes, the melting ice sheets left the surface strewn with boulders of various kinds of rock, some of them of great size. Some of them had been transported hundreds of miles from the places where the ice broke them from the bedrock. Has anyone wondered how the huge rock called “Lion’s Head” in Baguio in the Mountain Province got there? It must have been transported there during the interglacial period.

  

Photo by gobaguio.com

Some of the lakes occupy basins made by the damming of river valleys by drift which the ice left. The many waterfalls within the area covered by the ice, both in the east and west, were in most cases due to changes of drainage caused by the great glacier. Many of the earlier valleys were filled by the deposits made by the ice, and when the ice sheet melted, the surface waters sought new courses or formed marshes which developed into shallow basins. In the glaciated area there were many peat beds, formed in marshes which developed in shallow basins in the surface after the ice sheet melted.

Untill next time. The Story of the Philippines continues . . .

Rosalinda

More Facts About Long Island

Planting Fields State Park

Long Island, NY has 26 state parks.

 

 
East Hampton Coastline

Long Island's picturesque coastline is 1,180 miles long.

 

 
Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of Saint Louis

Charles Lindbergh began his famous non-stop flight from New York to Paris from Long Island's Roosevelt Field airstrip in the early morning of Friday, May 20, 1927.

The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) that landed on the moon was built in Long Island, NY by Grumman Corp.

F.Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Great Gatsby (which described Long Island's "Gold Coast") while living in Great Neck.

The Vanderbilt Planetarium, located in Centerport, NY is one of the largest and best-equipped in the United States.

The Long Island Railroad provides more than 303,000 rides to customers each weekday.

Long Island, NY has several national award-winning schools including more than 14 leading colleges and universities.

Long Island has world leaders in biotechnology.

Long Island has leading research and world-renowned hospitals.

Until next time. Stop and smell the roses.

Rosalinda, "The Rose Lady "

What do you know about Long Island, NY?

Do you know . . .

Long Island is the longest and the largest island in the contiguous United States. It looks like a fish swimming along Connecticut’s shore.

From end to end, it is about 118 miles eastward from New York Harbor to Montauk Point, and the widest north-to-south distance is 23 miles between Long Island Sound and the Atlantic coast.

The total land area is 1373 square miles. In Long Island’s head lies Brooklyn and Queens, New York City boroughs. Its granite backbone, the ridge of hills along the northern coast, twice rises to a height of about 380 feet, but elsewhere Long Island is quite low. Gardiner’s and Peconic bays split the tail for a depth of 50 miles, Orient Point forming the northern tip and Montauk the southern tip.

For the purpose of this blog, Long Island will refer to only Nassau and Suffolk counties including Fire Island although the island comprises four counties including Queen and Kings counties in the United States state of New York.

The population of Long Island is composed of two distinct elements. There are the wealthy, drawn by the mild oceanic climate of the island, who live in some of the most expensive and beautiful neighborhoods near the shorelines. Then there are the working class and some inhabitants of old village stock – baymen, fishermen, and market gardeners. There are also transient summer throngs, who crowd the seaside resorts.

Until next time. Stop and smell the roses.

Rosalinda, "The Rose Lady "