National Geographic Society

In just a few hours I am hoping on a train to begin one final adventure, dodging an elephant named Senegal while looking for petroglyps along the Ogooue River in Lope National Park. Dr. Richard Oslisly (who has asked me to make some photos of these petroglyphs and perhaps run into a few more) has found close to 2,000 petroglyphs in the rocks and caves there with drawings of animals, humans, and simple geometric shapes (indicating their age to some degree). In the same area, Dr. Oslisly has also found stone tools and arrow heads that were dated to around 400,000 BP (close to the beginning of humanty). If all of these archaeological discoveries were not enough, Dr. Oslisly and his colleagues are also conducting paleoclimatic reconstruction studies in the same area, which allow them to figure out what the climate used to be like thousands of years ago in Central Africa. Combined the archaeological finds and paleoclimate data can be used to see how past climate changes affected the lives and migrations of ancient humans!

Photo by Trevor Frost

In most African countries the roadsides and streams are often filled with trash and are also heavily polluted. It is also uncommon to drive for more than 30 minutes without seeing massive land clearings and never ending villages. Not in Gabon! Massive walls of dense tropical forest enclose the roads while the streams and roadsides have no trash or pollution. And villages are sparse. Consider, that seventy percent of Gabon's surface area is covered by virgin tropical forest and the abundance of elephants, hippos, chimpanzees, lowland gorillas and other creatures that live in the newly created national parks and it is easy to conclude that Gabon must be one of the most ecologically intact countries on earth.