During the Ice Age, glaciers stored portions of the water on the earth in the form of ice.

When the Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, the ice formation melted and the ocean levels rose. The land connections to Southeast Asia became flooded. The flooding submerged the land bridges and created the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos. Since then, these islands had been populated by migrating people who traveled by boats.

In 1976, Dr. Voss, a German scientist, challenged the Ice Age theory. According to him, the Philippines was never a part of mainland Asia. Dr. Voss claimed that the Philippine islands were located directly above a fault in the earths crust. Powerful earthquakes pushed up the landmass from the ocean floor and the Philippine islands rose from the bottom of the ocean.

Another version on the origin of the Philippines is the volcanic eruption theory. Dr. Bailey Willis, a geologist, concluded that the Philippines was a result of the eruptions of submarine volcanoes along the western side of the Pacific basin. These eruptions caused magma and lava to pile up, forming the Philippine isles.

A group of geographers believed that the Philippines constitute the remains of a lost continent during prehistoric times. This continent had sunk below the ocean waters. However, a few portions of land which now make up the Philippines were left above water.

The Philippines was formed due to eruptions of volcanoes in the periphery of the Pacific Basin of the Pacific Ocean as far as the eastern part of Asian continent The eruptions of underwater volcanoes some 200 million years ago resulted in the piling up of molten rocks causing the emergence of islands in the Pacific Ocean the continuing process of volcanism formed the structural foundation of the Philippines

According to this theory, the Philippines was not part of the continental shelf of Asia. It claims that two (2) processes of a. DIASTROPHISM upfolding caused the rising and formation of the Philippine archipelago, and all mountains in the archipelago This occurred some 200 million years ago

Proposed by Otley Beyer According to Dr. Beyer, the ancestors of the Filipinos came to the islands first via land bridges which would occur during times when the sea level was low, and then later in seagoing vessels such as the balangay. Thus he differentiated these ancestors as arriving in different "waves of migration", as follows:[ "Dawn Man", a cave-man type who was similar to Java man, Peking Man, and other Asian homo sapiens of 250,000 years ago. The aboriginal pygmy group, the Negritos, who arrived between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago. The seafaring tool-using Indonesian group who arrived about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and were the first immigrants to reach the Philippines by sea. The seafaring, more civilized Malays who brought the Iron age culture and were the real colonizers and dominant cultural group in the pre-Hispanic Philippines.

Focused on Language. This model suggests that Between 4500 BCE and 4000 BCE, developments in agricultural technology in China created pressures which drove certain peoples to migrate to Taiwan. These people either already had or began to develop a unique language of their own. By around 3000 BCE, these groups started differentiating into three or four distinct subcultures, and by 2500 to 1500 BC, one of these groups began migrating southwards towards the Philippines and Indonesia, reaching as far as Borneo by 1500 BCE, forming new cultural groupings and developing unique languages.