Short answers, pulled from the story.
Archaeologists recovered an anatomically modern human skull from the Tam Pa Ling Cave in 2009. This fossil is at least 46,000 years old and stands as the oldest modern human skeleton found to date anywhere in Southeast Asia.
A Lao prince named Fa Ngum founded the kingdom of Lan Xang meaning million elephants in the thirteenth century. His family had been exiled from the Khmer Empire by his father before he led ten thousand Khmer troops to conquer several Lao principalities along the Mekong river basin.
Between 1964 and 1973 the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos. This amount is nearly equal to the 2.1 million tons of bombs the US dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II.
King Savang Vatthana was forced to abdicate on December second 1975 when the Pathet Lao overthrew the royalist government. He later died in a re-education camp while between twenty thousand and sixty-two thousand Laotians died during the civil war.
France granted autonomy to Laos on October twenty-second 1953 when it gained full independence as a constitutional monarchy. The country had previously been part of French Indochina with around six hundred French citizens living there by 1940 producing tin rubber and coffee.