Humans ventured through Asia's forests much earlier than we thought

Humans can be found pretty much everywhere on the planet, but this wasn’t always the case. After Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, it was the beginning of a long journey as our species spread to distant corners of the world. 
Previously, evidence largely supported that the early voyage from Africa to Southeast Asia and eventually Australia was by the seaside: Our ancestors stuck to coastal and island locations, moving through today’s Sumatra, Philippines, and Borneo. But new findings show that island-hopping may have been just one method of travel for the humans who  became Australia’s First People. A paper published June 13 in Nature Communications outlines how modern humans passed by a cave in Northern Laos on their way through Asia, around 40,000 years earlier than anthropologists had thought. 
The findings from the Tam Pà Ling cave demonstrate two crucial discoveries—that modern humans moved through Arabia and Asia much earlier than previously known, and that these humans weren’t afraid to travel through woods and forests to get there. 
Humans ventured through Asia's forests much earlier than we thought