New Fossil Discovery Suggests Early Human Migration and Population Failure.

A fragment of a human shinbone found in Tam Pà Ling cave in Laos is up to 86,000 years old, indicating that Homo sapiens arrived in Southeast Asia as early as 86,000 years ago. The bones were likely washed into the cave during a monsoon. The researchers used luminescence dating and uranium-series dating to produce an age range for the human remains. The skull was estimated to be up to 73,000 years old, and the shin bone dates back as far as 86,000 years ago. The finding suggests a "failed population" from prehistory that dispersed to Southeast Asia and died out before contributing genes to today's human gene pool.