A remarkable archaeological find in West Africa has unveiled evidence that early humans inhabited tropical rainforests as far back as 150,000 years ago, challenging long-held assumptions about the environments our ancestors occupied. The discovery, centered at the Bété I site in southern Côte d’Ivoire, marks the earliest known association between humans and wet tropical forests, pushing back the timeline of rainforest habitation in Africa by over 130,000 years. The Bété I site, first explored in the 1980s by a joint Ivorian-Soviet team, yielded stone tools such as picks and retouched flakes buried in layers of sediment. Initially, limitations in dating…