VIENTIANE, LAOS – I normally would not make a trip to Laos lasting less than a week. Since travel time each way is about 20 hours, it is difficult to justify a total of 46 hours on the ground. But this is an exception. I am a paleoanthropologist, and with a team of researchers from France and Laos, I have explored the mountains of northern Laos since 2008. We have been looking for evidence of the earliest humans that migrated out of Africa and into Southeast Asia.
Since 2009, we have excavated at Tam Pa Ling (“Cave of the Monkeys”), where we discovered fossils of the earliest modern humans living in this part of the world. Since then, we have found the bones of at least three people who lived in this cave around 50,000 years ago. Today, these bones will find a permanent home in a new museum in Vientiane.
These are the oldest modern human fossils ever found from mainland Southeast Asia. We found them in the Annamite Mountains, which is an unexpected place to find the earliest migrants into this part of the world.
Anthropologists traditionally thought that when humans first migrated out of Africa, they used a southern migration route and traveled along the coast, staying in environments similar to those to which they were accustomed. Instead, we found these early human fossils high in the mountains and far from the coast.
These fossils tell us that not only were early humans moving into Asia earlier than we once thought (based on these fossils, at least 20,000 years earlier!), they were using routes that were unexpected – most likely following river systems through the mountains and forests rather than only using coastal pathways.
Mainland Southeast Asia appears to have been a crossroads as early humans moved southward into Indonesia and then Australia and further east into China. It is not surprising that humans have always had a great capacity for exploration, and it is likely that there were multiple dispersal paths of which early humans took advantage.
Today we will celebrate the opening of the new Lao National Museum in Vientiane, and these fossils will be put on display for the first time here in the country where they were discovered. We will officially present the Tam Pa Ling fossils and the story that they tell to the people of Lao and the Lao Ministry of Culture and Heritage.
Next Posts:
Discovering the bones of Tam Pa Ling
Bringing home the bones of Tam Pa Ling
Editor’s note: To reach Laura Shackelford, call 217-265-6741; email llshacke@illinois.edu.
