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http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html"Almost exactly in the middle [of the tropics] . . . lies . . . a vast expanse of dense, damp and inhospitable-looking darkness. . . . Anyone who has stood in the silent emptiness of a tropical rain forest must know how . . . [people] coming . . . from an open country . . . of sunlight . . . [must feel]. Many people who . . . have lived there, feel just the same, overpowered by the heaviness of everything -the damp air, the gigantic water-laden trees that are constantly dripping, never drying out between the violent storms that come with monotonous regularity, the very earth itself heavy and cloying after the slightest shower. And, above all, such people feel overpowered by the seeming silence and the ageold remoteness and loneliness of it all.
"But these are feelings of outsiders, of those who do not belong to the forest. If you are of the forest it is a very different place. What seems to other people to be eternal and depressing gloom becomes a cool, restful, shady world with light filtering lazily through the tree tops that meet high overhead and shut out the direct sunlight-the sunlight that dries up the non-forest world of the outsiders and makes it hot and dusty and dirty.
"Even the silence is a myth. If you have ears for them, the forest is full of sounds-exciting, mysterious, mournful, joyful. . . . And the most joyful sound of all . . . is the sound of the voices of the forest people as they sing a lusty chorus of praise to this wonderful world of theirs-a world that gives them everything they want. . . . But if you are an outsider from the non-forest world . . . this glorious song would just be another noise to grate on your nerves." - C. Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo
As Colin Turnbull noted in 1962, outsiders tend to depict rain forests as impenetrable worlds of chaos, timeless "jungles" in which ancestral plants, creatures, and humans are trapped. Romantic clichés portray counterfeit descriptions of a pristine jungle, unchanged through time, in which animals and plants are described with a plethora of aggrandizing superlatives. Contrarily, the human beings that inhabit this frozen homeland of botanical and zoological wonders are referred to with degrading epithets allusive to atavistic cultural features inherited from a timeless prehistoric past.
It is no surprise that archaeologists have shown little interest in discovering the prehistory behind the trees. Popular re-creations of early "primitive" life in the "jungle" draw on myths from nineteenth-century travel accounts, old ethnographic reports, and novels and perceive the forest as a barrier to "civilization." Thus, the early settlement of rain forests would be of little interest. Secondly, the tropical forest is often viewed as an extreme environment whose settlement requires great cognitive skills and technological endowment; that is, a high-risk and unhealthy ecosystem that was avoided by early hominids (Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, 2000), first colonized by anatomically modern humans (McBrearty and Brooks, 2000) or farmers (Bailey et al., 1989). Thirdly, there is the stereotype that the prehistory of the tropical forest is unknowable through archaeological research, given that organic remains decompose quickly in these environments, and potential archaeological materials would disintegrate and vanish in the acidic rain forest soils (see box 1). Yet, archaeological data to support or refute the above-described popular and academic assumptions have been totally lacking till recently.
Under the Canopy indicates that prehistoric foragers were fully capable of a long-term occupation of tropical forests and that, by late glacial times, the settlement of the world's rain forests was already well established. Uninterrupted human occupations for centuries must have inflicted a human signature on the makeup, structure, and geographical distribution of rain forests. Far from being pristine jungles, tropical forests today may be variable products of human and natural forces. And tropical forests in the past may be far from having modern analogues, as they occurred under Pleistocene climatic regimes not prevalent today. This is an important aspect to be observed when researching the many ways in which prehistoric groups responded to prehistoric ecosystems. The continuous and repeated inhabitation of the rain forest by prehistoric hunter-gatherers over hundreds of generations has brought about a tight interaction between human and biotic communities (Head, 1989; Piperno, 1994; Bush and Colinvaux, 1994), sometimes influencing tropical forest species composition through the use of .re (Piperno et al., 1991; Hopkins et al., 1993; Piperno, 1994, Bush and Colinvaux, 1994; Haberle, 1994; Kershaw, 1994; Hart et al., 1996).
Hunting and Gathering in Tropical Rain Forests: Was It Possible? Perceived environmental and diet constraints in today's closed forests, especially lack of wild carbohydrates (Bailey et al., 1989), have sustained current anthropological depictions of the early prehistoric settlement of the tropical forest. It has been demonstrated that present forest dwellers do not live independently of farming. Therefore, the ability of prehistoric foragers to subsist in tropical forests on purely hunting and gathering grounds was questioned (Hart and Hart, 1986; Headland, 1987; Bailey and Peacock, 1988; Bailey et al., 1989; Bailey and Headland, 1991; Gamble, 1993; Headland, 1997). As a result, anthropological models portrayed dense tropical forests of the Holocene as unfriendly environments unable to support prehistoric foragers before the advent of farming (Headland, 1987; Bailey et al., 1989; Bailey and Headland, 1991; Headland, 1997). Prehistoric hunter-gatherers, thus, lived in tropical forests for the last few millennia, only after farmers colonized rain forests and enhanced a naturally low productivity by farming and subsequent environmental alteration of closed-canopy forests (Bailey et al., 1989: 73). The farming modification of the forest brought about a wider availability of game, which, in turn, made hunting and gathering feasible. This theory, referred to as the "null hypothesis," has very important implications for human evolution. These implications are (1) early humans lacked the capacity to settle extreme environments; (2) extensive population deserts existed throughout the wet tropical belt during the entire Pleistocene and most of the Holocene; (3) inherent human inability to colonize and live on rain forests was overcome during the late Holocene; (4) global colonization by archaic humans was highly differential and excluded tropical forests; and (5) hunter-gatherers were incapable of indirect or direct modification of the tropical forest's structure, composition, and productivity.
In spite of well-known ecological limitations for present-day humans dwelling in tropical forest environments (animal and plant food supplies are highly diverse, dispersed, and difficult to obtain, but see Townsend, 1990; Colinvaux and Bush, 1991; Bahuchet et al., 1991; Hladik and Dounias, 1993; Brosius, 1991; Dwyer and Minnegal, 1991; Endicott and Bellwood, 1991; Stearman, 1991), this volume presents archaeological evidence that the occupation of tropical forests has deep roots and much predates the horticulturalist colonization of these ecosystems. An early pre-farming settlement of tropical forests is the rule, not the exception. The archaeological sequences reported in this book, as well as those reported elsewhere (Horsfall, 1987; Gnecco and Mora, 1997; Roosevelt et al., 1996; Mercader et al., 2000), demonstrate that tropical forest environments supported a continuous settlement by hunter-gatherer groups for millennia.
But, Was There Any Forest at the Time of Pleistocene Occupation?
An assessment of the feasibility of tropical forest occupation by prehistoric hunter-gatherers relies on the available environmental data to demonstrate the timing, geographical distribution, and nature of lowland forest formations in the distant past (see box 2). Until the late 1980s archaeological inquiry on the ability of humans to occupy lowland tropical rain forests was highly dependent on biogeographic models derived from the "refugia hypothesis" (box 2), geological indicators of perceived "aridity" (box 3), and paleoenvironmental records from forest-fringing sites and regions separated from the lowland rain forest by large geographical distances (box 4). Current data suggest that during glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene the wet tropics may have sustained heterogeneous vegetational formations, including tropical forests that subsisted in a cooler, drier, and CO2-starved atmosphere and yielded distinct admixtures of highland and lowland species with many shrubs and herbaceous plants on the forest floor. Recent data worldwide suggests that, for the late Pleistocene at least,
1. Some tropical lowlands currently covered by evergreen forest were not severely deforested, as shown by the presence of arboreal taxa in the pollen and phytolith records older than 10,000 b.p. Botanical assemblages indicate a lowering of montane altitudinal vegetation belts and an admixture of lowland and highland species (Amazon: Colinvaux et al., 1996; Piperno, 1997; Haberle and Maslin, 1999; Africa: Talbot and Johannessen, 1992; Jahns et al., 1998; Maley and Brenac, 1998; Dupont et al., 2000; Mercader et al., 2000; Southeast Asia: Newsome and Flenley, 1988; Van der Kaars and Dam, 1995; Sahul: Hopkins et al., 1993; Hope and Tulip, 1994; Haberle, 1998).
2.There was an overall drop of temperature of approximately 5-7°C (Colinvaux et al., 1996). Therefore, cooling environments are expected during glacial periods, thereof called "hypothermals."
3.CO 2 content in the atmosphere could have been remarkably lower, causing signi.cant changes in plant development, forest structure, and altitudinal distribution of plants ( Jolly and Haxeltine, 1997; Cowling, 1999).