2010 Volume 74 Issue 4 Pages 566-584
Tropical rainforests are often assumed to be "green deserts" where humans cannot live by entirely depending on wild food resources. Recent studies in central African rainforests, however, suggest that hunter-gatherers could survive there even in the dry season, when food resources are relatively scarce. Increasing archaeological evidence also suggests the existence of early, pre-agricultural human habitation in the forests of central Africa. A recent study in Cameroon showed that the key food sustaining the forest life is comprised of annual wild yams, which accounts for more than 60% of energetic intake during the forest life. These yam species are gregarious, and are found only in limited "gaps" formed under supposedly human influences in the past. Other forest food species are also found more in secondary forests than in mature forests. Moreover, recent studies have shown the distribution of a variety of human-induced vegetation throughout the equatorial forests of Africa. It is necessary, therefore, to examine the implications of such human-induced vegetation for understanding the history in the region. The Bantu-speaking farmers, who form the majority of African people south of the Equator, migrated to the Congo Basin forest since the first millennium BC from present-day western Cameroon. After they had acquired iron tools for clearing the forests, and plantain bananas, a new crop adapted to the humid forest environment, in the first millennium AD, they entered the interior forests of the Congo Basin. Since then, they repeated migration and dispersal over an extensive area, and led a life in small social units of villages, several of which sometimes formed loose associations. While such small-scale, dispersed social units induced a moderate impact on the forest ecosystems through shifting cultivation, they could still coexist with the forests, reproducing mosaic environments composed of mature forests and secondary vegetations of varying stages of succession. In the present-day rainforests of central Africa, large-scale logging operations have been accelerating, whereas movements toward forest conservation in the interests of the environment have also picked up steam. Under that situation, the forest-living people and their customary rights to the forests are often neglected. It is necessary to examine the present forest ecosystem and landscape from the perspective of historical ecology, which may provide them with a basis for customary rights to the forests.
