New Evidence Shows We Lived in Ancient Rainforests 150,000 Years Ago

For much of human history rainforests have been the poster child for untouched, virgin wilderness. We only had to look at the vast trees and hidden world beneath the canopy to instantly tell that what we were looking at was wild, untouched by man.

In more recent years we have come to realize that this is not true in the slightest. As our understanding of rainforest biomes grew we found that, far from being pristine, they were in fact largely influenced by nomadic tribes who crisscrossed their interiors for millennia.

However rainforests, typically difficult to traverse and packed with things that bite, sting or scratch, are still largely considered barriers to the spread of early man, so long as you go far enough back into the past. There was a point, at some time, when these were too much for humans to handle, right?

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Well, a new study published in Nature has pushed that timeline back as far as 150,000 years, way earlier than anyone had thought. The study, of the rainforests of what is now Côte d’Ivoire, has found evidence of groups of humans cohabiting in clearings amidst the dense undergrowth at this time.

This is extremely early, dating to the Middle Pleistocene before even the Stone Age. Humans only appeared in Africa some 300,000 years ago, and this relatively quick inhabitation of the rainforest suggests they were not really a barrier at all.

Our previous dating for the earliest rainforest inhabitation was only 18,000 years ago in Africa, although examples which may be as old as 73,000 years are known in Asia. There was some inconclusive evidence which suggested an ancient rainforest inhabitation in Kenya, some 77,000 years old, which had been hitherto dismissed: this will clearly need to be revisited in the light of the new evidence. 

But this new discovery is more than just a simple reshuffling of what early man was doing back in the day. The fact that our ancient ancestors found it apparently easy and convenient to inhabit forested areas reshapes our understanding of how we hunted our prey, how we fed our communities, and how our hunter gatherer society evolved on a fundamental level.

Man is evolved for long distance running, preferring to persistently chase its prey until exhaustion. But if, all these millennia ago, we were trying our luck in forests, perhaps this interpretation of who we really are, how we came to be what we are today, is wrong.

Header Image: An ancestors may have been much happier living in rainforests than we thought. Source: Goodfon / Public Domain.