Recent discoveries and improved investigative techniques since the first edition of this book was published in 2014, have opened up dramatic new insights into Southeast Asia’s past. We now know that when the first modern humans reached this region at least 60,000 years ago, they encountered not two, but four different human species and interbred with at least one of them. More advanced generation analyses of ancient DNA mean we can trace precisely the expansion southwards of the first rice farmers from the lowlands of the Yangtze River.