Image courtesy of Phil P Harris, CC BY-SA 2.5
Joel
Kontinen
Did early humans live in the rainforests ages ago? This is what
new study suggests.
Nearly 70,000
years ago, modern humans created stunning rock art in an unexpected place: the
tropical Indonesian island of Sulawe. The finding, announced in January, made
headlines for being the oldest known rock art in the world.
But the
discovery's location also highlighted another surprising finding: that members
of our species, Homo sapiens, were thriving in the tropics tens of
thousands of years ago.
But that
perspective has been changing over the past few decades. Sulawesi's ancient
rock art is one of several clues that modern humans may have lived in tropical
rainforests for hundreds of thousands of years. That would mean modern humans
could have been living in these hot, wet regions since soon after the emergence of our species in Africa around 300,000 years
ago.
Understanding
how, when and where modern humans inhabited rainforests — and how that shaped
our evolution — "may give us an insight into something about what it means
to be uniquely human," Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist and
anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and author of the
book "Jungle: How
Tropical Forests Shaped World History" (Penguin, 2022), said, .
But the evolution
thing is not true.
Conventional
wisdom held that modern humans emerged from one parent population in an East African
savanna and
did not encounter rainforests until around 12,000 years ago, after agriculture emerged to
support survival in these climes. The lack of H. sapiens fossils from
Africa's tropics appeared to support this view.
Then, in
2017, scientists identified the oldest modern-human fossils — except they weren't in East
Africa, but rather in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. The following year, Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the
Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and her colleagues reviewed
archaeological evidence, including the Jebel Irhoud fossils, and integrated it
with genetic data from present-day populations. The evidence pointed
toward H. sapiens originating from many
subdivided populations across Africa.
Source:
Sophie Berdugo 2026
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