You have to wait until nightfall to speak to the forest spirits. The village chief, Hortense Kakolousso, summoned the wise men to the place where the first curtain of trees is located. On the ground, lit by two candles, pieces of biscuits, sweets and bananas were placed on small leaves. Around them, a bottle of soda, another of beer and a carton of wine complete the offering. A rather young man speaks to explain the presence of foreigners: “We shouldn’t see this as a bad thing. They are archaeologists. They are there to explain the world and educate our children. We must protect them.”She exhorts, with the consent of the assembly, in the Douma dialect spoken in the region of Lastoursville, in the heart of this equatorial forest that covers Gabon. Once the ritual is over, Hortense closes the ceremony. Both the dead and the living are informed. Tomorrow, with this safe conduct, the mission can begin.
To reach the Youmbidi cave, nestled on the side of an imposing dark grey cliff buried in vegetation, a short one-hour walk is enough. But the environment is damp and the ground slippery. The path is cleared with a machete and notches are left here and there in the trees, like so many marks for the way back. Richard Oslisly and Geoffroy de Saulieu, however, are on familiar ground. On June 30, archaeologists from the Research Institute for Development associated with the National Agency for National Parks of Gabon (ANPN) begin their fourth excavation campaign. Their goal: to uncover the secrets of this rock shelter, discovered in 2015, where they discovered a sedimentary sequence attesting to an ancient occupation. at least twenty-five thousand years.
Youmbidi, with its 40-metre-wide porch, a depth of just 20 metres and a maximum height of 3 metres, is not the most spectacular of the fifty cavities counted around Lastoursville. But the quality of the material found by scientists was immediately considered promising for better understanding the history of hunter-gatherer populations and their interactions with an environment long considered too inhospitable for societies to evolve there.
“Caves are very rare in Central Africa and are precious because, in open-air places, the acidity of the soil dissolves bones. Here we have a perfect stratigraphic cut from the beginning of the Holocene (- 12,000 years), in which carved stones, fragments of pottery, charcoal, buffalo bones, monkey teeth and small rodents, seeds that already allow us to trace a diet, are preserved with varying densities depending on the layers. But the Holy Grail would be to find a human tooth or, better still, a skull.”This is the story of Richard Oslisly, who has been wandering around Gabon for forty years. His work has revealed the country’s unsuspected archaeological wealth, although until now it has been very little exploited due to a lack of resources.
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