Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago

This excellent paper shows that humans have been able to live in a wide variety of environments for longer than was previously known. Generality is our specialty. But the paper also implicitly demonstrates how difficult it is to uncover the story of human evolution.

Finding tropical forest sites that were occupied by humans during our early years is dependent on pure luck. It takes only a few years after humans have abandoned such a site for nearly all evidence that we occupied it to be obliterated. If the site continues to be located in a tropical forest until current times, what hope do we have of finding it amid all the vegetation in the forest? That we've found any ancient tropical forest sites that were occupied by our ancestors is remarkable.

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