Far East Kingdoms

Early South-East Asia

Palaeolithic Cultures Early Africa (Intro) Early Americas (Intro) Early Asia (Intro) Early China (Intro) Early Europe (Intro) Early Near East (Intro) Early Oceania (Intro)

South-East Asia is one of the five broad regions of Asia as a whole, including Central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Siberia (less often known as North Asia). The rarely used label of 'West Asia' refers to the Near East. That region aside, it would appear to be South Asia which witnessed the earliest presence outside of Africa of anatomically modern humans in the form of Homo sapiens - between about 70,000-60,000 BC.

The region appears to have provided a west-to-east conduit for early migrating groups as they left Africa and the Near East. Small tribes either remained in what is now India or continued to progress along the coastline to reach South-East Asia and Oceania (and especially Australia). Other groups headed north to enter East Asia roughly around 60,000 BC (see the Hominid Chronology feature link for more).

South-East Asia incorporates all of the territory to the south of East Asia. It consists of two dissimilar sections which involve a continental projection (all of which is usually referred to as mainland South-East Asia), and a string of archipelagos to the south and east of the mainland (known as insular South-East Asia).

Modern countries included in this are Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and the small city-state of Singapore on the mainland, with the long peninsular nation of Malaysia acting as a bridge to connect to the insular nations of Brunei, Indonesia, and the Philippines. China and Tibet provide the regional border with South Asia and East Asia, while Oceania provides an eastern border.

The system which has evolved to catalogue the various archaeological expressions of human progress is one which involves cultures. For well over a century, archaeological cultures have remained the framework for global prehistory. The earliest cultures which emerge from Africa and the Near East are perhaps the easiest to catalogue, right up until human expansion reaches the Americas. The task of cataloguing that vast range of human cultures is covered in the related feature (see link, right).

(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, Benjamin W Roberts & Marc Vander Linden (Eds), from Palaeo-Anthropology and Palaeolithic archaeology in the people's republic of China, Wu Rukang & John W Olsen (Left Coast Press, 2009), from Vietnam: A New History, Christopher Goscha, from Early Mainland Southeast Asia, C Higham (River Books Co, 2014), from Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopaedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, Keat Gin Ooi (ABC-Clio, 2004), from The Macmillan Dictionary of Archaeology, Ruth D Whitehouse (Macmillan, 1983), and from External Links: Encyclopaedia Britannica, and East Asia Palaeolithic (Claire Smith, Ed, Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology, 2014), and Stone Age Asia (Encyclopaedia Britannica).)