This is scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Cynthia Graber.

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People have been living near rainforests for tens of thousands of years,

but most available evidence has intense use of forest resources starting just

10,000 years ago.

So scientists thought that the dense tropical forests were so hard to navigate and find

food in that humans would have mainly depended on open plains nearby, but some

researchers had doubts. Modern forest faragers do just fine in the rainforest, and some evidence

in Africa pointed to humans in rainforests well before the 10,000-year mark.

Now there's hard evidence out of Sri Lanka that people roamed and dined on rainforest offerings

at least 10,000 years earlier than we thought.

The finding is in the journal Science.

Researchers measured carbon and oxygen isotopes

in the remains of 26 humans found in the Sri Lankan rainforest.

The bodies were some 20,000 years old. Isotope signatures differ for plants that live beneath the closed rainforest canopy

than for plants from the open plains.

Any animals that eat those plants then also carry those forest isotopes,

as did the remains showing that these humans

subsisted on tropical forest vegetation. The findings show that humans have been

taking advantage of rainforests for at least 20 millennia. Whether our

accelerated resource extraction will allow any

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