A study led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoantropology (MPI-GEA), in Germany, and in which the Spanish National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Cenieh) of Burgos (North) participated, discovered that 150,000 years ago humans lived in the tropical jungles of Western Africa, about 130,000 years before what was thought.
Until now it was known that humans emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago and about 200,000 migrated to the Middle East, a region in which thousands of years remained and from which they continued expanding, first to Asia (100,000 years ago) and then to Europe (45,000).
However, recent research is demonstrating that this vision of human dispersion from Africa to the rest of the world is incomplete and that Western Africa is a little studied region that could play a much more important role in the history of human evolution.
The study, whose details were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, defends that human evolution occurred in several regions and habitats that have not been studied enough.
History of a site: the settlement of humans in West Africa
The history of this finding dates back to the 1980s, when Iodé Guédé, a researcher at Félix Houuchouët-Boigny University and co-author of the Nature study, investigated the Bété I site (ivory coast) and discovered that it was deeply stratified and that contained stone tools, but failed to determine its antiquity.
“We knew that the site presented the best possible opportunity to find out how far the occupation of the tropical jungle in the past went back,” said Eleanor Scerri, head of the human paleosystems research group of (MPI-GEA).
For that reason, the team returned to the site and, this time, they estimated that human groups had lived in this place at least 150,000 years ago.
Until then, the only evidence that demonstrated that humans had lived in tropical jungles were about 70,000 years in Southeast Asia and about 18,000 for the jungles of Africa.
That is, the study “delays the oldest known evidence of humans in tropical jungles in more than double the estimate known so far,” said Eslem Ben Aous, a researcher at CENIH and MPI-GEA and main author of the study.
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Although the difficult environmental conditions of Western Africa prevent the conservation of human or animal fossils, this time the team managed to overcome these barriers combining two modern dating methods: the optically stimulated luminescence and the electronic paramagnetic resonance that applied on the quartz grains.
In addition, when analyzing sediment samples they discovered that the region was very wooded, that the pollen and the waxes of the leaves were typical of the wet forests of Western Africa, and that the site was not in a narrow strip of forest, but in a dense grove.
“For decades, research on the origin of our species in Africa has focused on the areas in which it was easier to find fossils, such as open environments (meadows and savannas) and the coastal areas of North Africa and South Africa,” said Ben Arouse.
But “the overrepresentation of these regions has given rise to a dominant vision, possibly biased and incomplete” of history because the tropical jungles have been barely studied, which has led to think that “West Africa had a peripheral or void role in human evolution,” he explained.
However, Ben Arous said, “that idea that does not agree with the investigations carried out in Asia, where tropical jungles are associated with sophisticated behaviors and advanced cognition,” which allows us to think that men who lived in the surroundings of the African tropical jungle could play a more relevant role in human evolution.
With EFE information
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