First we were told that the first human civilisations were Mesopotamia and Egypt, ca. 3000BCE. Then we found out about Göbekli Tepe, stretching the timeline back to 10,000BCE.

And now, a new paper in Nature suggests that humans have been coming together in large numbers for a lot longer - but not in the now-arid regions of the Middle East.

Instead, say researchers, "archaeological evidence now demonstrates that humans settled tropical forest regions "on previously unimagined scales", and have actively manipulated these ecologies for "at least 45,000 years" - and perhaps much longer:

In the last ten years, the archaeologically acknowledged human inhabitation of tropical forests has quadrupled in age.


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