Europe’s “untouched” wilderness was shaped by Neanderthals and hunter-gatherers
Picture Europe tens of thousands of years ago. Thick forests covered much of the land. Herds of elephants, bison,
Picture Europe tens of thousands of years ago. Thick forests covered much of the land. Herds of elephants, bison, and aurochs roamed freely. Small bands of humans moved through this world carrying fire and spears.
New research suggests those early people changed their surroundings far more than scientists once believed.
Computer Models Reveal Early Human Impact
An international team led in part by researchers at Aarhus University used advanced computer simulations to examine how climate, large animals, natural fires, and humans shaped European vegetation during two past warm periods. The team then compared those simulations with extensive fossil pollen data from the same eras. By matching the models with real world evidence preserved in pollen, they were able to estimate how much each factor influenced plant cover.
The results point to a clear conclusion. Both Neanderthals and later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers significantly altered vegetation patterns across Europe, long before agriculture began.
“The study paints a new picture of the past,” says Jens-Christian Svenning, professor of biology at Aarhus University. The project involved experts in archaeology, geology, and ecology from The Netherlands, Denmark, France, and UK.
“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,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
The findings were recently published in PLOS One.
Humans and the Decline of Megafauna
The researchers focused on two specific warm intervals in European history.
The first was the Last Interglacial period around 125,000-116,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans living in Europe. The second was the Early Holocene, 12,000-8,000 years ago, just after the last Ice Age, when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from our own species, Homo sapiens, inhabited the region.
During the Last Interglacial, Europe supported a wide range of megafauna. Elephants and rhinoceroses lived alongside bison, aurochs, horses, and deer.
By the Mesolithic period, that picture had changed. Many of the largest animals had vanished or their numbers had dropped sharply. This reflected the broader wave of megafauna losses that followed the global spread of Homo sapiens.
A New View of Prehistoric Europe
“Our simulations show that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers could have influenced up to 47% of the distribution of plant types. The Neanderthal effect was smaller, but still measurable — approximately 6% for plant type distribution and 14% for vegetation openness,” says Anastasia Nikulina.
Human influence showed up in two main ways. One was the use of fire, which burned trees and shrubs. The other was hunting large herbivores, a factor that has often been overlooked.
“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,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
According to Nikulina and Svenning, these findings challenge the idea that Europe was an untouched wilderness before farming began.
“The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe’s ecosystems,” says Jens-Christian Svenning. “The study is consistent with both ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers and archaeological finds, but goes a step further by documenting how extensive human influence may have been tens of thousands of years ago — that is, before humans started farming the land,” elaborates Anastasia Nikulina.
AI Simulations and Interdisciplinary Research
Nikulina emphasizes that the project brought together multiple fields, including ecology, archaeology and palynology (knowledge about pollen). The team also developed detailed computer models to simulate ancient ecosystems.
“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 optimization algorithm from AI. That let us run a large number of scenarios and identify the most possible outcomes,” says Anastasia Nikulina.
Svenning adds that the modeling made one thing clear.
“The computer modeling 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,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Even with these advances, gaps remain in our knowledge about how early humans influenced their environments.
Nikulina and Svenning note that similar simulations could be applied to other regions and time periods. North and South America and Australia are especially intriguing because they were not inhabited by earlier hominin species before Homo sapiens. That makes it possible to compare more recent landscapes with and without human presence.
“And although the large models paint a broad picture, detailed local studies are absolutely essential to improve our understanding of the way humans shaped the landscape in prehistoric times,” says Jens-Christian Svenning.
