Human Landscape
The forests of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park are now thought to have been relatively undisturbed for many hundreds of years, although the area may have been previously inhabited by Bantu peoples. No sign of past permanent settlements has been found within the Park. However, high concentrations of oil palm (Elais guineensis) seeds have been found in the streams of the area. Carbon dating of these seeds has shown that they date from about 2300 to 900 years ago.
Most oil palm populations have an obvious anthropic origin, i.e. agriculture; thus it seems the agriculturists left the area about 900 years ago, and that the forest has been without significant human influence since that date. However, a different hypothesis has been proposed by other authors, who suggest that oil palms were one of the natural ecotone species growing at the forest-savannah boundary.
There are two villages which have inhabitants directly employed by the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Bomassa-Bon Coin and Makao-Linganga. Bomassa-Bon Coin is situated next to the Park headquarters on the banks of the river Sangha, 30 kilometres away from the NNNP boundary, while Makao is the next nearest large settlement, about 40km from the eastern border of the Park. These villages served as base camps for poachers exporting ivory from the region during the 1970s and 1980s, and this partly explains the choice of these two settlements as the focal point for National Park activities.