Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Living In A West African Rain Forest 140,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Tuesday, 30 June 2026

Refuting Creationism - Humans Were Living In A West African Rain Forest 140,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield

Stone Tool

Credit: Jimbob Blinkorn, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

According to the findings of an international team led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, with contributions from the University of Sheffield, published in February 2025 in Nature, humans were living in the wet tropical forests of what is now Côte d’Ivoire about 150,000 years ago — more than 140,000 years before creationists imagine their mythical “Creation Week”, when they believe the single ancestral couple of all modern humans was created by magic somewhere in the Middle East.

The date itself is no surprise to anyone who understands the real evolutionary history of our species. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens had emerged in Africa by about 300,000 years ago, and the evidence increasingly points not to a single cradle, but to a pan-African process involving populations adapted to different regions and environments. What is striking about this discovery is not that humans were present in Africa 150,000 years ago, but that they were living in a tropical rainforest — an environment long assumed to have played only a minor, late role in human evolution.

That older assumption fitted neatly with the simplified “savannah hypothesis”, in which the ancestors of humans were thought to have diverged from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos as climatic change fragmented African forests and created more open grassland and woodland habitats. In that view, rainforest was more of a barrier than a formative environment. But the emerging picture is far more interesting: early H. sapiens were not simply creatures of open savannahs, coasts or grasslands, but members of a flexible, adaptable species able to exploit a wide range of African habitats long before the later dispersals into Eurasia.

Part of the reason rainforest environments have been under-represented in accounts of human evolution is that they are poor places for preserving bones, artefacts and organic remains. Acidic soils, heavy rainfall, dense vegetation and rapid biological decay all work against the survival of the archaeological record. That makes the Bété I site in southern Côte d’Ivoire especially important. Using optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods, the researchers constrained the onset of human occupation there to around 150 ka. Plant-wax biomarkers, stable isotope data, phytoliths and pollen from the associated sediments then showed that the environment at the time was wet tropical forest.

This pushes the earliest known secure evidence of human occupation of a rainforest environment back by about 80,000 years. It also suggests that tropical forests were not late, marginal or forbidding habitats into which modern humans only ventured after acquiring some special new cultural trick, but part of the ecological range within which H. sapiens was already living during the Middle Pleistocene.

The finding was made possible because modern dating and environmental reconstruction techniques could be applied to sediments associated with stone tools first found at the site in the 1980s. In other words, once again, patient science has extracted a coherent, evidence-based history from the ground — a history that would not exist at all if there had been a recent global genocidal flood churning the world’s sediments into the chaotic mess required by creationist mythology.

Dating Ancient Sediments and Tools. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) is a dating method used on mineral grains, usually quartz or feldspar, that have been buried in sediment. While buried, these grains absorb natural background radiation from the surrounding soil and rocks. This energy becomes trapped in defects within the crystal structure. When the grains are exposed to sunlight, the trapped signal is reset. In the laboratory, scientists stimulate the grains with light and measure the luminescence released. This reveals how long it has been since the grains were last exposed to daylight, and therefore when the sediment was buried.

OSL is especially useful in archaeology because stone tools themselves often cannot be dated directly, but the sediments in which they were buried can be. In this way, OSL can provide an age for the layers associated with human occupation.

Electron spin resonance (ESR) dating also measures the effects of natural radiation over time, but it does so by detecting trapped electrons in materials such as tooth enamel, shells, quartz grains or some carbonates. Radiation from the surrounding environment gradually changes the arrangement of electrons in the material. By measuring the accumulated signal and estimating the radiation dose received each year, scientists can calculate how long the material has been exposed to that radiation.

In combination, OSL and ESR can provide independent checks on the age of archaeological deposits. They are particularly valuable at sites where organic material is absent, too degraded, or too old for radiocarbon dating. At Bété I in Côte d’Ivoire, these methods helped place human occupation of a tropical rainforest environment at about 150,000 years ago.

The paper in Nature was accompanied by a news item from the University of Sheffield:

Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago
The earliest evidence of humans living in tropical rainforests in Africa, around 150,000 years ago, has been published in a new study in Nature by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

A new study published in Nature provides the earliest evidence that our human ancestors lived in the tropical rainforests of Africa
The study involving University of Sheffield researchers dates humans living in rainforests back to 150,000 years ago, 80,000 years earlier than found in other rainforests sites around the world
Luminescence and Electron Spin Resonance dating techniques were used to date sediments containing Middle Stone Age tools found at an archeological site in Côte d'Ivoire, Africa, to a time when tropical rainforests existed across the region
The study argues that tropical rainforests were not a barrier to the spread of modern humans and supports the theory that human evolution happened across a variety of regions and habitats.

The earliest evidence of humans living in tropical rainforests in Africa, around 150,000 years ago, has been published in a new study in Nature.

Humans were thought to have not lived in rainforests until relatively recently due to them being thought of as natural barriers to human habitation.

However the new study - published by an international team led by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, with contributions from the University of Sheffield - found that humans were living in rainforests within the present-day Côte d'Ivoire around 150,000 years ago.

The study puts the evidence for humans living in rainforests anywhere in the world, back by 80,000 years, and argues that human evolution happened across a variety of regions and habitats.

The team re-excavated an archaeological site from the 1980s currently found within rainforest, in which stone tools had previously been found deep within sediments but could not be dated. They then applied new scientific methods to the site which were not available during the original study.

The original trench

Credit: Jimbob Blinkorn, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

Ancient pollen, silicified plant remains (phytoliths) and leaf wax isotopes from site sediments were also analysed and found to indicate that when humans were dropping their stone tools in the region, it was a heavily wooded wet forest, typical of humid West African rainforests.

Professor Mark Bateman, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, used a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, to discover the burial age of individual grains of sand from eight samples throughout the site. His work showed that the archaeological site extended back from 12,000 years ago right through to around 150,000 years ago. These results were then corroborated by Electron Spin Resonance dating.

The stone tools found at the site were thought to be from the Middle Stone Age, so they could have been as old as 500,000 years, or as young as 10,000 years. Key to finding when they were being used was the application of modern dating techniques to the sediments in which the stone tools were found.

It is incredibly interesting to take a grain of ancient sand and be the first to know when it was deposited. It is even more so when the age of the sand changes what we know of how, and where, our ancient ancestors lived.

Professor Mark D. Bateman, co-author.
School of Geography and Planning
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK.

Before our study, the oldest secure evidence for habitation in African rainforests was around 18,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of rainforest habitation anywhere came from southeast Asia at about 70,000 years ago. This pushes back the oldest known evidence of humans in rainforests by more than double the previously known estimate.

Dr. Eslem Ben Arous, first author
Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH)
Burgos, Spain.

Several recent climate models suggested the area could have been a rainforest refuge in the past as well, even during dry periods of forest fragmentation. So we knew the site presented the best possible chance for us to find out how far back into the past rainforest habitation extended. This work reflects a complex history of population subdivision, in which different populations lived in different regions and habitat types.

We now need to ask how these early human niche expansions impacted the plants and animals that shared the same niche-space with humans. In other words, how far back does human alteration of pristine natural habitats go?

Professor Eleanor Scerri, senior author.
Human Palaeosystems Group
Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI-GEA)
Jena, Germany.

There are other sites waiting to be investigated that could provide equally as exciting results. However this study was completed just before the site was destroyed by mining activity, highlighting that being able to do work such as this is vitally important in being able to further study the history and evolution of the human species.

Professor Mark D. Bateman.

Publication:
Ben Arous, E., Blinkhorn, J.A., Elliott, S. et al.
Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago.
Nature 640, 402–407 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08613-y

Abstract
Humans emerged across Africa shortly before 300 thousand years ago (ka)^1,2,3. Although this pan-African evolutionary process implicates diverse environments in the human story, the role of tropical forests remains poorly understood. Here we report a clear association between late Middle Pleistocene material culture and a wet tropical forest in southern Côte d’Ivoire, a region of present-day rainforest. Twinned optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods constrain the onset of human occupations at Bété I to around 150 ka, linking them with Homo sapiens. Plant wax biomarker, stable isotope, phytolith and pollen analyses of associated sediments all point to a wet forest environment. The results represent the oldest yet known clear association between humans and this habitat type. The secure attribution of stone tool assemblages with the wet forest environment demonstrates that Africa’s forests were not a major ecological barrier for H. sapiens as early as around 150 ka.

Fig. 1: The Bété I site.

a, General map showing the African sites dated to MIS 6 (around 130–190 ka). b, Location of Bété I site. c, Sequence at Bété I in 2020 after sampling for geochronology and palaeoecological proxies.

Ben Arous, E., Blinkhorn, J.A., Elliott, S. et al.
Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago.
Nature 640, 402–407 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08613-y

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Once again, science has revealed a chapter of human history that creationism could never have predicted and cannot explain. The evidence does not point to a recent magical creation of a single couple in the Middle East, followed by a short human history of a few thousand years. It points instead to an ancient, adaptable African species, already occupying varied environments 150,000 years ago, and leaving behind traces that can still be recovered, dated and understood by modern science.

The significance of the Bété I site is not merely that it adds another date to the archaeological record, but that it changes the ecological setting in which we need to think about early Homo sapiens. Tropical rainforest was not necessarily a late refuge or an impenetrable barrier. It may have been one of the environments in which our species developed the behavioural flexibility that later allowed it to spread across deserts, coasts, grasslands, mountains and, eventually, the rest of the planet.

Creationism, by contrast, contributes nothing to this understanding. It offers no dating method, no testable hypothesis, no reason why stone tools should be found in ancient rainforest sediments, and no explanation for why those sediments should contain the chemical and microscopic signatures of a wet forest ecosystem. Its only response is to deny, distort or ignore the evidence, while science does the painstaking work of reconstructing the past from measurable facts.

And, as so often, the evidence is exactly where it should not be if the creationist fantasy of a recent global flood were true. Instead of a chaotic jumble of sediments, fossils and artefacts left by a planet-wide catastrophe, we find layered deposits with a coherent environmental history, datable by independent physical methods and consistent with a deep human past. The stones at Bété I speak not of magic, myth or divine tinkering, but of real people living real lives in an ancient African rainforest long before the Bible’s authors imagined their little universe into existence.

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