NEW findings from a cave in northern Laos add to a growing body of evidence that modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia over 80,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The groundbreaking findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.

Analyses of fossils and sediments from Tam Pà Ling ('Cave of Monkeys' in Lao) by an international team of scientists — including a Filipino researcher formerly from the University of the Philippines (UP) and currently at the Flinders University Microarchaeology Laboratory in South Australia — have pushed back the time when we know our species, Homo sapiens, was present in Mainland Southeast Asia.