Back in the day, in the northern part of modern-day Laos, an early modern human died and its corpse washed into a nearby cave. Sure, it doesn’t sound like a particularly noteworthy event. But researchers dated the remains of this human’s skull to at least 46,000 years ago, making it the oldest modern human ever discovered in Southeast Asia.
Scientists discovered the skull fragments back in 2009, but have only this week published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Features not found in any earlier specimens of the Homo genus, such as the absence of a brow ridge on the skull’s frontal bone, mark it as a modern human.
Artist’s rendering of an Australopithecus afarensis
When archaeologists hear whispers of humanity’s past, it’s through the painstaking work of piecing together a story from artifacts and fossilized remains: The actual calls, grunts, and other sounds made by our evolutionary ancestors didn’t fossilize. But working backward from clues in ancient skeletons, Dutch researcher Bart de Boer has built plastic models of an early hominin‘s vocal tract—and, by running air through the models, recreated the sounds our ancestors may have made millions of years ago.