Researchers have discovered an ancient skull from a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos and identified it to be the oldest modern human fossil found in Southeast Asia.
Anatomical evidences suggest that modern humans first came into being about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Archaeological evidence and genetic data claim that they started migrating from Africa to extreme Southwest Asia 90,000 years ago and into Southeast Asia 60,000 years ago.
Scientists, till date, have not found any significant fossil evidence of modern human occupation in the mainland of Southeast Asia due to its warm, tropical climate which is not favorable for retaining fossils. In the early 1900s, a team of researchers discovered skulls and skeletons of several modern humans, which were about 16,000 years old, in another cave in the Annamite Mountains. However, the present skull, which was found in 2009 in "the Cave of the Monkeys", is almost 46,000 to 63,000 years old.
"It's a particularly old modern human fossil and it's also a particularly old modern human for that region," said Laura Shackelford, anthropologist at University of Illinois and team lead of the current research with anthropologist Fabrice Demeter, at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. "There are other modern human fossils in China or in Island Southeast Asia that may be around the same age but they either are not well dated or they do not show definitively modern human features. This skull is very well dated and shows very conclusive modern human features."
Shackelford also mentioned the extreme challenges that the team faced while working in this area.
"It's incredibly difficult to access the site - it's only 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the capital, but it takes us two days to drive there because of the rough terrain. We have to hike up the side of a cliff, do a bit of rock-climbing to get to the mouth of the cave, and then going in, we have to go 60 meters (200 ft) down a slope of wet clay. We also have to carry a generator and lights with us to see in the cave. We have to push pigs out of the way to get through the jungle - there are just pigs wandering around there. Every bit of clay has to be removed and taken back up by hand, trowel and bucket, so work is incredibly slow," she maintained.
Researchers informed that they did not find any other artifacts with the skull, which suggests that people of that era did not use the cave as a dwelling or burial site. Shackelford believes that the person died in some other place and the body somehow managed to make its way into the cave later.
The recent findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
