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"Filipinos (Fil: Mga Pilipino); feminine: Filipinas (Fil: Mga Pilipina), or the Filipino people (Fil: Lahing Pilipino) Pt-br-filipino.ogg listen (help·info), refers to the people of the Philippines, an archipelago in Southeast Asia, and their descendants abroad.[2] It is estimated that their population is more than 100 million worldwide.
Colloquially, they refer to themselves as Pinoy (feminine: Pinay), which is formed by taking the last four letters of Pilipino and adding the diminutive suffix -y.[2] Many Philippine languages lack /f/ as a phoneme and is substituted by /p/ turning Filipino into Pilipino.
Overseas Filipinos are an important contributor to the Philippines' culture and economy. Filipino-Americans, the largest overseas group, have a long history in the United States as one of the first and largest groups of Asian-Americans.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Ancestry
o 1.1 Ancient to Pre-colonial Filipinos
o 1.2 Spanish colonization
o 1.3 American occupation
o 1.4 Contemporary period
* 2 Genetic studies
* 3 Languages
* 4 Diaspora
o 4.1 Filipinos in the Americas
o 4.2 Filipinos in the Oceania
* 5 See also
* 6 References
[edit] Ancestry
[edit] Ancient to Pre-colonial Filipinos
Further information: History of the Philippines (Before 1521)
The earliest human remains known in the Philippines are the fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals, discovered on May 28, 1962 by Dr. Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum.[citation needed]
Physical anthropologists who have examined the Tabon Man skullcap are agreed that it belonged to modern man, homo sapiens, as distinguished from the mid-Pleistocene homo erectus species. This indicates that Tabon Man was Pre-Mongoloid (Mongoloid being the term anthropologists apply to the racial stock which entered Southeast Asia during the Holocene and absorbed earlier peoples to produce the modern Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, and "Pacific" peoples). Two experts have given the opinion that the mandible is "Australian" in physical type, and that the skullcap measurements are most nearly like the Ainus or Tasmanians. Nothing can be concluded about Tabon man's physical appearance from the recovered skull fragments except that he was not a Negrito.[citation needed]
About 30,000 years ago, the Negritos, who became the ancestors of today's Aeta, Agta, Ayta, Ati, Dumagat and at least 25 other tribes of the Philippines which currently consist around .003% of the total population. They descended from more northerly abodes in Central Asia passing through the Indian Subcontinent reaching the Andamanese Islands traveling South to the malay peninsula, Borneo & finaly the Philippine Islands. Before the discovery of "Tabon Man", Aetas were once thought to be the Aboriginal Filipinos.
About 3000 BC, a loose confederation of peoples known as 'Nesiots', from what today is Indonesia, came to the Philippines. They were to become the ancestors of the present-day Luzon and Mindanao hill tribes. There were two waves of successive Nesiot immigration. The first wave saw a people who have light complexions, aquiline noses, thin lips, and deep-set eyes. The second wave of migration were shorter and heavier in physique, having darker complexion, thick lips, large noses, and heavy jaws.
Starting 4000-2000 BC,[citation needed] Austronesian groups descended from Yunnan Plateau in China and settled in what is now the Philippines by sailing using balangays or by traversing land bridges coming from Taiwan. Most of these Austronesians primarily used the Philippines as a pit-stop to the outlying Pacific islands or to the Indonesian archipelago further south. Malay-Austonesians who came from 200 B.C. to 100A.D. were the headhunting Malays, the ancestors of the Bontoks, Ilongots, Kalingas, and other headhunting tribes in northern Luzon. Anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of the Philippines contends that what fossil evidence of ancient men show is that they not only migrated to the Philippines, but also to New Guinea, Borneo, and Australia. Jocano further believes that the present indigenous Filipinos are products of the long process of evolution and movement of people. This not only holds true for Filipinos, but for the Indonesians and the Malays of Malaysia, as well. No group among the three is culturally or racially dominant. For thousands of years, except for a few tribes isolated by time & geographical barriers, The Pre-Mongoloid(Tabon man), Negritos (Aetas), Indones (Nesiots), & Malays (Austronesians) have already Assimilated & Integrated with each other and with all the other races that settled later in the country. Currently, These "Malayo-Polynesians" comprise around 60-80% of the nation's racial stock & genepool.
A 16th century Tagalog couple (transcribed as Tagales) of the Mah