Early Homo sapiens may have lived in rainforests, new clues suggest — and it could overturn our understanding of human evolution
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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. Researchers have long thought that early humans didn't live in tropical rainforests, as these places haven't yielded human fossils and are teeming with dangerous life, including venomous animals, poisonous plants and parasites that would deter early populations. 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), told Live Science.
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. 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.
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. These populations periodically met and exchanged genes and ideas, but they also spent long periods apart, adapting to different ecosystems and evolving diverse traits. In this new understanding, the earliest members of our species may have evolved not just in the grassy savanna but in tropical rainforests, too.
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