Laos

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Archaeologists have uncovered two new bone fragments in a cave in northern Laos, suggesting that Homo sapiens wandered southeast Asia up to 86,000 years ago. The findings, published this week in Nature Communications Over more than a decade, excavations in the Tam Pà Ling cave have uncovered seven bone fragments sandwiched between layers of clay. Laura Shackelford, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and her colleagues have regularly had to hike through sticky tropical heat to reach the mountain-top cave. After digging 7 metres down, excavations have finally hit bedrock, and the team has been able to reconstruct a complete chronology of the cave, says Shackelford. Sediment and bones unearthed in the cave show that modern humans have inhabited the mountainous region for at least 68,000 years, and passed through even earlier. “I can’t overestimate the importance of having another point on our map for early modern humans in southeast Asia,” says Miriam Stark, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was not involved in the work. “Understanding southeast Asia is critical to understanding...

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Often overlooked in favour of its better-known neighbours, landlocked Laos remains one of Southeast Asia’s most beguiling destinations. Caught in the middle of the two Indochina wars and long isolated from the rest of the world, the country retains a slow, rather old-fashioned charm, and its people – incredibly laidback and friendly, even by Asian standards – are undoubtedly one of the highlights of any visit. Laos’s lifeline is the Mekong River, which runs the length of the country, at times bisecting it and at others serving as a boundary with Thailand; the rugged Annamite Mountains historically have acted as a buffer against Vietnam, with which Laos shares its eastern border. Most people visit the country as part of a wider trip in the region, often entering from Thailand and following the Mekong further south. However, Laos alone rewards further exploration, and with a little more time it’s not hard to feel like you’re visiting places where few Westerners venture. Stretching from the forest-clad mountains of the north to the islands of the far south, there’s enough here to keep you occupied for weeks, and still feel as though you’d barely scratched the surface. For such a small country, Laos is surprisingly diverse in terms of its people. Colourfully dressed hill tribes populate the higher elevations, while in the lowland river valleys, coconut palms sway over the Buddhist monasteries of the ethnic Lao. The country also retains some of the French influence it absorbed ...