2023-11-16 04:45:32
It has been believed that the Europe encountered by the first anatomically modern humans who populated it was mostly covered by dense forests. A new study challenges this widely held belief.
Official history says that the ancestors of today’s Europeans cut down the trees in many forests and drained numerous swamps. In other words, they created many of the meadows and similar terrain that have been considered a byproduct of the start of agriculture. But new research suggests that’s not what happened.
The new study, carried out by the team of Elena A. Pearce, from Aarhus University in Denmark, shows that in those times there was much more open and semi-open vegetation than has been believed.
“The idea that the landscape was covered by dense forests on most of the continent is simply wrong,” Pearce said.
The ancient pollen samples helped the research team identify which plants occupied the land more than 100,000 years ago, in the last interglacial period.
The research team obtained a lot of data from pollen samples from large areas of Europe.
By observing the composition of different types of pollen in the soil layers of ancient buried wetlands, researchers were able to deduce what the vegetation was like more than 100,000 years ago.
The samples reveal that plants that do not thrive in dense forests often made up large components of the vegetation.
According to the new study’s calculations, between 50% and 75% of the landscape was covered by open or semi-open vegetation.
The large herbivorous mammals that then lived in large numbers in Europe contributed to this: bison, horses and also larger beasts such as elephants and rhinoceroses. These animals consumed large amounts of plant biomass and, therefore, had the ability to keep tree growth at bay.
Large animals, such as the elephants in the illustration, probably helped maintain much of the European landscape as open or semi-open vegetation during the last interglacial period. (Illustration: Brennan Stokkerman)
The study is titled “Substantial light woodland and open vegetation characterized the temperate forest biome before Homo sapiens.” And it has been published in the academic journal Science Advances. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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