Researchers investigated two warm periods in European prehistory. The Last Interglacial, around 125000 - 116000 years ago, witnessed Neanderthals as its sole human inhabitants amid diverse megafauna such as elephants, rhinoceroses, bison, and aurochs. In contrast, the Early Holocene (12000 - 8000 years ago) saw Homo sapiens, with a notable decline in the largest species as human populations expanded.
The study determined that climate changes and natural causes alone could not fully account for ancient vegetation patterns. Factoring in human actions-burning vegetation and hunting large herbivores-improved the correlation with pollen data. "It became clear to us that climate change, large herbivores and natural fires alone could not explain the pollen data results. Factoring humans into the equation - and the effects of human-induced fires and hunting - resulted in a much better match," said Jens-Christian Svenning.
Simulations estimate that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers influenced up to 47 percent of plant distribution, while Neanderthals affected 6 percent, and increased landscape openness by 14 percent. Overhunting resulted in fewer grazing animals and denser vegetation, though Neanderthals never eliminated megafauna due to their small numbers.
"The Neanderthals did not hold back from hunting and killing even giant elephants. And here we're talking about animals weighing up to 13 tonnes. Hunting also had a strong indirect effect: fewer grazing animals meant more overgrowth and thus more closed vegetation. However, the effect was limited, because the Neanderthals were so few that they did not do eliminate the large animals or their ecological role - unlike Homo sapiens in later times," stated Jens-Christian Svenning.
According to Anastasia Nikulina, this research contests the notion of 'untouched' European landscapes before agriculture. "The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe's ecosystems," she said. The work builds on interdisciplinary collaboration, uniting ecology, archaeology, and AI-driven simulation modeling. "This is the first simulation to quantify how Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers may have shaped European landscapes. Our approach has two key strengths: it brings together an unusually large set of new spatial data spanning the whole continent over thousands of years, and it couples the simulation with an optimisation algorithm from AI. That let us run a large number of scenarios and identify the most possible outcomes," explained Nikulina.
Jens-Christian Svenning added, "The computer modelling made it clear to us that climate change, the large herbivores such as elephants, bison and deer, and natural wildfires alone cannot explain the changes seen in ancient pollen data. To understand the vegetation at that time, we must also take human impacts into account - both direct and indirect. Even without fire, hunter-gatherers changed the landscape simply because their hunting of large animals made the vegetation denser."
Despite these insights, the researchers suggest more studies-especially in regions inhabited only by Homo sapiens-could further illuminate the extent of early human influence. Detailed local analyses are also crucial for refining our understanding of how people shaped the ancient environment.
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