Figure 3 - uploaded by Emuobosa Akpo Orijemie
Content may be subject to copyright.
![Aspects of the material culture of Shum Laka. Decorated pottery (1-4); waisted axe (5); basalt ground and polished adze (6) (after [60]).](profile/Emuobosa-Orijemie/publication/359066091/figure/fig2/AS:1139276431527937@1648636076430/Aspects-of-the-material-culture-of-Shum-Laka-Decorated-pottery-1-4-waisted-axe-5.png)
Aspects of the material culture of Shum Laka. Decorated pottery (1-4); waisted axe (5); basalt ground and polished adze (6) (after [60]).
Source publication
Africa, the cradle of human evolution, has one of the largest and most diverse rainforests in the world. The African rainforests contain evidence of human occupation as well as fluctuating climate during the Pleistocene; such evidence offers archaeologists and palaeoecologists the opportunity to understand how climatic fluctuations have influenced...
Context in source publication
Citations
... Moving on in time, Orijemie [58] synthesizes past climatic variability in the forest of West-Central Africa during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene period to understand the interaction of climate on the development and stability of human communities in the region over time. Combining palaeoclimate and vegetation histories, Orijemie highlights the significance of climate variability on the development and survival of early hominin ancestors and humans in the forest regions of West-Central Africa. ...
Since Darwin, studies of human evolution have tended to give primacy to open ‘savannah’ environments as the ecological cradle of our lineage, with dense tropical forests cast as hostile, unfavourable frontiers. These perceptions continue to shape both the geographical context of fieldwork as well as dominant narratives concerning hominin evolution. This paradigm persists despite new, ground-breaking research highlighting the role of tropical forests in the human story. For example, novel research in Africa's rainforests has uncovered archaeological sites dating back into the Pleistocene; genetic studies have revealed very deep human roots in Central and West Africa and in the tropics of Asia and the Pacific; an unprecedented number of coexistent hominin species have now been documented, including Homo erectus , the ‘Hobbit’ ( Homo floresiensis ), Homo luzonensis , Denisovans, and Homo sapiens . Some of the earliest members of our own species to reach South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the tropical Americas have shown an unexpected rapidity in their adaptation to even some of the more ‘extreme’ tropical settings. This includes the early human manipulation of species and even habitats. This volume builds on these currently disparate threads and, for the first time, draws together a group of interdisciplinary, agenda-setting papers that firmly places a broader spectrum of tropical environments at the heart of the deep human past.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.
African pangolins are intensively harvested to feed illegal trade networks. We focused on the conservation genetics of the most trafficked African species, the white-bellied pangolin (WBP; Phataginus tricuspis), through the genotyping of 562 individuals from reference populations and urban bushmeat markets in a vibrant trade hub from western Central Africa. Across Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon, there was a lack of genetic differentiation and a signature of isolation-by-distance possibly due to unsuspected dispersal capacities involving a Wahlund effect. Despite a high level of genetic diversity compared to western Africa, we detected a 74-83% decline in the effective population size of WBP during the Middle Holocene. Private allele frequency tracing approach indicated up to 600 km sourcing distance by large urban markets from Cameroon, involving transnational trade activities. The 20 microsatellites markers used in this study provided the necessary power to distinguish among all WBP individuals and should be considered a valuable resource for future forensic applications. Because lineage admixture was detected in the study area, we recommend a multi-locus approach for tracing the pangolin trade. The Yaounde market was a major recruiter of genetic diversity in the region, and should receive urgent conservation action to mitigate the pangolin trade.
The African continent is endowed with significant biodiversity and environmental resources, including terrestrial and aquatic species, water bodies, natural mineral reserves, and an enormous and diverse landmass. This makes it a prime investment hub for some of the world's biggest corporations. Therefore, effective and sustainable policies on managing these resources are crucial to balance the need for and pursuit of development with preserving biodiversity and environmental resources. This chapter gives an overview of the policies regulating the biological and environmental resources on the continent. It begins by presenting Africa's biological and ecological resources based on available literature and then highlights the policy structure currently adopted by some countries within the continent. The policy and legal framework of some of the continent's leading and emerging economies – Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia - are also discussed. To enhance the current policy structure, African countries need to understudy the constantly-evolving legal frameworks of model countries like China and Australia, which have made significant progress in framing and constantly updating their biodiversity and ecological policies. Some key challenges of sustainable biological and environmental policymaking in Africa include inadequate government funding, the government's inability or unwillingness to prioritize sound policymaking, and scarce literature on progress made by several African countries in supporting evidence-based policymaking and enacting. We recommend that political support be galvanized for sound policymaking and revisions for sustainability purposes. It is pertinent that evidence-based research informs scientifically-clear policy drafts and that this should replace the conventional, politically driven, and ineffective ones. The potential of digital platforms to raise awareness of policymakers about emerging biological and environmental concerns is also encouraged.
