The First People on Vietnamese Soil

Vietnamese history is usually told from the Hung Kings onward, the legendary rulers of the country's founding myth. But people were living on this land long before that, and they left no writing at all. What they left is a handful of teeth in cave sediment, river cobbles struck into tools, and shell middens metres thick. For nearly a century archaeologists have been picking through those remains, trying to read them. On some points they agree; on others the argument is still open — and the open questions are worth telling as much as the settled ones.¹

Tham Khuyen Cave sits in Lang Son, a northern province on the Chinese border. In the mid-1960s, excavators cut into the cave's sediments and found the teeth of hominoids — the group that includes apes and humans. Reading them was not simple. Most of the teeth in the cave belonged to orangutans, so any firm claim had to begin by setting out criteria to tell one tooth from another. Once sorted, the collection turned out to include teeth of Homo erectus, the upright human species, alongside teeth of an extinct giant ape.² A survey of Vietnamese Palaeolithic archaeology puts the count at ten Homo erectus teeth from Tham Khuyen and the neighbouring cave of Tham Hai, mixed with the bones of animals that no longer exist here, such as the giant panda and the stegodon, an extinct relative of the elephant.³

The age of that layer was measured two ways: electron spin resonance on tooth enamel and sediment, and uranium-series dating on the cave's flowstone. The main fossil-bearing deposits were laid down roughly 475,000 years ago.² The figure sounds precise, but it comes with an error range of plus or minus 125,000 years.³ Over distances of time like that, archaeology says "about" and rarely says "exactly".

In 1960, in Thanh Hoa province, a team excavating a Bronze Age cemetery noticed stones scattered on the slope of Nui Do nearby. Nui Do is a basalt hill beside a tributary of the Ma River. The site was studied by Boriskovsky, a Soviet archaeologist working as an adviser, who also trained Vietnam's first generation of Palaeolithic specialists. Around 1,500 stone artefacts were collected in the early years; he analysed more than 800 of them in detail and found that the great majority were flakes, with only two classic Acheulean handaxes among them.³

He concluded that Nui Do belonged to the Lower Palaeolithic. Yet in his own book he recorded that he still had doubts about the age of those artefacts.³

Those doubts grew. In 1986 Vietnamese archaeologists found a Bronze Age workshop on the hill itself, and the stone axes it produced look a great deal like Palaeolithic handaxes.³ The difficulty is that bifacial tools of that shape were made across South and East Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, so dating them by shape alone invites error. The 2021 survey says plainly that this is why even a seasoned specialist like Boriskovsky misattributed these late bifacial tools to the Lower Palaeolithic; many researchers have questioned that attribution, starting from a critical review published in 1990.³

One disagreement deserves to be stated outright. A great many popular Vietnamese articles give Nui Do an age of 300,000 to 400,000 years. We could not find a scientific study that puts that absolute figure on Nui Do specifically, so this episode does not repeat it as settled fact.

By the late Palaeolithic the human trace on this land becomes much clearer. Vietnamese archaeology recognises two stone-working industries before the Hoa Binh period: the Nguom industry, roughly 40,000 to 23,000 years ago, which concentrated on tools made from flakes; and the Son Vi culture, roughly 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, whose toolmakers flaked cobbles taken from riverbeds.⁴

Son Vi takes its name from the place where it was first identified. According to material published in Vietnam, the site consists of two locations in Son Vi commune, Phu Tho province, found in 1968 and excavated in 1969, yielding more than a thousand artefacts.⁵ There is no clean line between Son Vi and Hoa Binh: for a stretch of time the two overlapped, and the archaeologist behind the Vietnamese survey has written a separate paper on that transition.⁴

The name "Hoa Binh culture" — the Hoabinhian, in international literature — comes from cave excavations carried out in northern Vietnam during the 1920s by the French archaeologist Madeleine Colani. The first Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East, meeting in Hanoi in January 1932, passed a resolution defining the culture as she had described it.¹

145 Hoabinhian sites are known in Vietnam today, and nearly all of them lie in caves or under limestone rock shelters; only two are open-air. Hoa Binh province and Thanh Hoa alone account for 106 of them, arranged in clusters along the valleys.¹

Their characteristic tool is a river cobble flaked on one face, alongside pestles, grinding stones, and implements of bone, antler and shell. From this the diet comes partly into view. They hunted small and medium game, taking many different species but only a few animals of each — no single species was hunted out. They gathered mountain and stream snails, ate them and dropped the shells where they lived, year after year, leaving shell layers three to five metres deep in some caves.¹

So had they begun to farm? Since the 1970s there has been a hypothesis that Southeast Asia was among the earliest places in the world to domesticate plants, based on seeds and fruit found in a few caves in Thailand. The Vietnamese survey of nearly a century of Hoabinhian research answers carefully: as of now there is no strong evidence that Hoabinhian people in Vietnam practised domestication or cultivation.¹ The depth of time inside these caves is striking: at Con Moong Cave in Thanh Hoa the cultural deposits run more than ten metres deep, and a sample from the bottom dates to some 74,000 years ago.¹

Vietnamese schooling presents a tidy sequence: Son Vi, then Hoa Binh, then Bac Son, three cultures following one another. Vietnamese archaeology uses "culture" in a narrow sense — the material traces left by one specific population.¹ Western scholarship has recently taken a different view: as more sites are excavated and more radiocarbon dates come in, the boundaries between those three names keep blurring, so it makes better sense to treat them as a range of stone-working industries in northern Vietnam spanning roughly 27,000 to 8,500 years ago.⁶

Even the question of where the Hoabinhian began is unsettled. Most Vietnamese archaeologists regard Vietnam as its birthplace, since this is where the richest and most typical sites and artefacts are found.¹ The handbook chapter just cited, meanwhile, states as background fact that Hoabinhian technology was present in Yunnan, in southwest China, from around 43,000 years ago, and spread south only afterwards.⁶

So this opening episode ends where honesty ends. What is certain: upright humans lived on this land hundreds of thousands of years ago, and foraging communities lived for long stretches in the caves of the north. What is not: the true age of several famous artefacts, the boundaries between these cultures, and where the Hoabinhian began. The next episode leaves archaeology for legend, with the story of Lac Long Quan and Au Co.