First Human Vestiges
Archaeological excavations revealed the existence of human on Vietnamese territory as early as the Paleolithic age. The presence of Homo erectus around 500,000 BC was found in caves of Lang Son and Nghe An provinces in North Vietnam. The oldest Homo sapiens fossils from mainland Southeast Asia are of Middle Pleistocene age. They include mostly isolated teeth from northern Vietnam at Tham Om (250-140 kyr), and Hang Hum (140-80 kyr). Teeth attributed to Homo sapiens are also known from the Late Pleistocene of Vietnam at Dong Can (16 kyr) and from the Early Holocene at Mai Da Dieu/Mai Da Nuoc (8.2 kyr), Lang Gao and Lang Cuom (6.44 ± 0.5 kyr).
There are some caves with Paleolithic remains typified by the Nguom industry and the Son Vi culture, dating from 28,000 BC to 8,000 BC. The most important event in Vietnamese prehistory is the appearance of Hoa Binh and Bac Son cultures - the most typical cave cultures in Southeast Asia. Archeological excavations in Thailand (Spirit Cave, Non Nok Tha) and northern Vietnam (Dong Son, Hoa Binh) revealed a major surprise: the first Southeast Asians had agriculture and pottery at the same time as the city-states of ancient Mesopotamia. The finds of the fossils of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens in the cave sites in North Vietnam have confirmed that the evolution of human formation took place the most dramatically in the karst topology, from the late Pleistocene to Holocene.
Read more about this topic: History Of Vietnam
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“If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.”
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