For nearly a century, archaeologists have puzzled over thousands of giant stone jars scattered across the highlands of Laos. Carved from solid rock and weighing several tons each, they stand in clusters across the landscape, yet almost all of them have turned up empty, leaving their original purpose almost impossible to determine. That has finally…

For decades, discussions about the earliest stages of ape evolution have largely centred on East Africa. Many of the fossils that shaped scientific thinking were discovered there, leading to the view that the region was the primary setting where the ancestors of modern apes first diversified before spreading elsewhere. That picture has now become less…