Humans lived under the leafy canopy of a West African rainforest by at least 150,000 years ago.
Previously, the oldest secure evidence for humans living in African rainforests dated to about 18,000 years ago. The earliest human rainforest presence in the world had been placed at about 70,000 years ago in Southeast Asia.
Now, new sediment analyses at Bété I, a site in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, indicate that people occupied wet tropical forests tens of thousands of years earlier, researchers report February 26 in Nature. The date and site location may help to explain how Homo sapiens evolved.
A researcher holds one of the