Human Remains Double Known Rainforest Occupation Time

Physical remains in Sri Lanka show that people lived in rainforests 20,000 years ago, at least 10,000 years earlier than previous evidence showed. Cynthia Graber reports March 17, 2015 | |

People have been living near for tens of thousands of years, but most available evidence has intense use of forest resources starting just 10,000 years ago. So scientists thought that the dense, were so hard to navigate and find food in that humans would have mainly depended on open plains nearby.

But some researchers had doubts. Modern forest foragers do just fine in the rainforest. And some evidence in Africa pointed to humans in rainforests well before the 10,000 year mark.

Now there’s hard evidence, out of , that people roamed and dined on rainforest offerings at least 10,000 years earlier than we’d thought. The finding is in the journal . [Patrick Roberts et al, ]

Researchers measured carbon and oxygen isotopes in the remains of 26 humans found in the Sri Lankan rainforest. The bodies were some 20,000 years old.

Isotope signatures differ for plants that live beneath the closed rainforest canopy than for plants from the open plains. Any animals that eat those plants then also carry those forest isotopes—as did the remains, showing that these humans subsisted on tropical forest vegetation.

The findings show that humans have been taking advantage of rainforests for at least 20 millennia. Whether our accelerated will even one thousand years from now is a very open question.

—Cynthia Graber

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