After the discovery of the woman from Tam Pa Ling, in 2012 scientists found evidence of a second fossil within the cave, a human jawbone of around the same age.
But the jawbone was not that of a fully modern human. It had tell-tale features that looked part-modern human and part-archaic. Perhaps it was a hybrid, like that found in Manot, Israel?
If so, what other kinds of people could have been living in Asia when modern humans arrived?
300 miles from Laos, in China, comes evidence that Southeast Asia was once home to an ancient archaic human known as Homo erectus.