The Filipino (also known as
Pilipino) are citizens of the
Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, Most Filipinos refer to themselves colloquially as
"Pinoy" (feminine:
"Pinay"), which is a
slang word formed by taking the last four letters of
"Pilipino" and adding the
diminutive suffix "-y". The lack of the letter
"F" in the pre-1987 Philippine alphabet,
Abakada, had caused the letter
"F" to be substituted with
"P". This is why, when the 28-letter modern Filipino alphabet was made official in 1987, the name
Filipino was preferred over
Pilipino. The name
Filipino was chosen by the Spanish explorer
Ruy López de Villalobos, who named the islands "las Islas Filipinas" ("the Philippine Islands") after
Philip II of Spain.
History
Pre - Colonial:In 2010, a
metatarsal from "
Callao Man" discovered in 2007 was dated through
uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old. Prior to that, the earliest
human remains found in the Philippines were thought to be the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone, discovered in the 1960s by Dr. Robert B. Fox, a North American
anthropologist of the National Museum....
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