Get the latest tech news

Evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150k years ago

The earliest evidence of humans living in tropical rainforests in Africa, around 150,000 years ago, has been published in a new study in Nature by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

Ancient pollen, silicified plant remains (phytoliths) and leaf wax isotopes from site sediments were also analysed and found to indicate that when humans were dropping their stone tools in the region, it was a heavily wooded wet forest, typical of humid West African rainforests. Professor Mark Bateman, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, used a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, to discover the burial age of individual grains of sand from eight samples throughout the site. Professor Eleanor Scerri, senior author of the study and leader of the Human Palaeosystems research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, said: “Several recent climate models suggested the area could have been a rainforest refuge in the past as well, even during dry periods of forest fragmentation.

Get the Android app