150 thousand years ago there was Homo Sapiens in a tropical forest of ivory coast

Abiyán. The Anyama neighborhood is any corner of Abiyán where shops abound, children play quietly and barbecues smoke in the corners, but here the Homo sapiens 150 thousand years ago, when the economic capital of Ivory Coast was an immense tropical jungle.

Archaeologists and anthropologists of various nationalities have just designated this neighborhood as the place of the oldest human presence in a tropical forest, according to a study published in the magazine Nature.

Before this finding, the traces of the Homo sapiens – Our species appeared 300 thousand years ago – accepted by science in this type of environment were much more recent, of no more than 70 thousand years in Asia and Oceania, the researchers point out.

In Abiyán there are only 3,500 hectares of tropical forest in the bank, a national park in the center of the city that is increasingly reduced due to urbanization.

Since 1982, the ivory archaeologist François Guédé Yiodé, alerted by a geologist, began excavations in Anyama in a private field.

Together with other researchers, he excavated several meters of land under which stone tools of the Pleistocene were hidden, a period of the Paleolithic. He made them analyze and keep them at home.

Carved in flint, quartz and other rocks, Picos were used to split materialswhile other tools, called choppers, with a sharp edge served to cut the skin of an animal, he explains.

“African forests were not an important ecological barrier for the Homo sapiens 150 thousand years ago, ”the researchers conclude.

In addition, the data They highlight the importance of the numerous biomes (region that covers a single climate) of Africaand its diversity in the evolution of humanity, they point out.

Guédé Yiodé considers that the study should convince To people to stop questioning the early existence of man on African soil.