EN
The present article is an attempt of reconstruction of areas occupied by rain forests in Central Africa before the anthropogenization of the natural environment. The recession of limits of forests began with the affluence of agricultural Bantu population to this region (two thousands years ago). Before that, Central Africa had been inhabited by Pygmy and Pygmoid tribes of gatherers and hunters who did not affect the environment that strongly. The optimum method of reconstruction of historie vegetation consists in the comparison of results of pollen and macroscopic analysis of organic remnants found in sediments in different places of a given area. As in the case of Central Africa there are not enough studies of this type, in order to delimit the historic tropical rain forest range the modified method of calculating the plants' vegetation cycle period has been used, due to the existence of correlation between plants' vegetation period and the potential range of singular vegetation formations. Comparing the range of present-day tropical rain forest with the historic range obtained after the application of described method the image of areas with deforestation as result of human activity (fig. 5) has been presented. The second part of the article describes the history of degradation of rain forest in Central Africa from the beginning of agriculture in the area up till present. The shifting cultivation (slash and burn) being a cause of 70% of all present deforestations is its main subject.