New research suggests that prehistoric humans were not just wandering through pristine forests but actively reshaping them with fire and spears, leaving a measurable mark tens of thousands of years before farming began.
Ancient Europe was no untouched wilderness
For years, many researchers pictured Ice Age and early post-Ice Age Europe as a mostly natural stage: thick woods, roaming megafauna, and a few human groups living lightly on the land. The latest study, published in the journal PLOS One, challenges that comforting scene.
An international team used advanced computer models to reconstruct how European vegetation changed during two warm phases in the past:
- Last interglacial (around 125,000–116,000 years ago), when Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe
- Early Holocene (about 12,000–8,000 years ago), when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of our own species, Homo sapiens, lived across the continent
They compared their simulations with detailed pollen records taken from lake sediments and peat deposits. Pollen grains act as tiny time capsules, revealing which plants dominated at different moments in deep history.
When researchers added human hunting and fire to their simulations, the virtual landscapes suddenly matched the real pollen data far more closely.
That finding points to a clear conclusion: people were altering ecosystems long before ploughs, permanent villages and domesticated crops appeared.
Neanderthals hunted giants, not just deer
The modelling suggests Neanderthals influenced vegetation, though on a smaller scale than later humans. Their impact showed up mainly through hunting large herbivores.
During the last interglacial, Europe supported an astonishing range of big animals. Forest elephants and rhinoceroses shared space with bison, wild cattle (aurochs), horses and several species of deer. These huge grazers and browsers kept landscapes open, broke saplings and shaped plant communities.
Evidence now indicates that Neanderthals did not avoid the biggest of these beasts. They sometimes hunted prehistoric elephants weighing up to 13 tonnes, using coordinated group tactics and close-range weapons.
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Fewer elephants and other mega-grazers meant less pressure on young trees, allowing bushier, denser vegetation to spread.
The models suggest Neanderthals affected roughly 6% of plant-type distribution and about 14% of overall vegetation openness. That sounds small, but for such low population densities, it represents a noticeable ecological role.
Neanderthals were too few to wipe out large mammals across the board. Even so, their selective hunting, fire use and movement patterns subtly shifted the balance between open areas and closed forest.
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers reshaped nearly half the landscape
By the Early Holocene, the picture had changed dramatically. The last ice age had ended, glaciers retreated, and Homo sapiens had spread throughout Europe. Many of the largest animals had vanished or collapsed in numbers, part of a broader global wave of megafauna losses that followed our species’ expansion.
The new study finds that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had a far stronger influence on vegetation than Neanderthals did.
According to the simulations, Mesolithic communities may have altered up to 47% of the distribution of plant types across Europe.
Two main mechanisms emerge from the data:
- Fire use: Controlled or semi-controlled burning of shrubs and trees opened up forests, encouraged certain plants and helped manage game.
- Intensive hunting: Targeting large herbivores reduced grazing pressure, shifting ecosystems towards more closed-canopy woodland in some regions, and patchier mosaics in others.
This pattern backs up ethnographic observations from more recent hunter-gatherer societies, where fire and hunting are key tools for managing landscapes, promoting useful plants and attracting animals.
A challenge to the myth of pristine pre-farming Europe
The research team argues that these findings cut against the popular idea of an untouched European wilderness existing until farmers arrived from the Near East around 8,000 years ago.
The evidence points to Neanderthals and Mesolithic people as “co-creators” of European ecosystems, not passive occupants of a natural stage.
Forests, grasslands and mixed mosaics were already shaped by human decisions about where to hunt, where to burn, and which animals to target. Agriculture deepened and formalised that relationship, but it did not start it.
How AI and pollen records rewrote ancient ecology
Behind the headlines sits a technical achievement. The team combined several strands of expertise: ecology, archaeology, geology and palynology, the study of pollen.
They built large-scale simulations of past European ecosystems, then used an AI-based optimisation algorithm to run vast numbers of scenarios. Each scenario varied the intensity of climate effects, natural fires, animal populations and human activity.
| Factor tested | Role in the models |
|---|---|
| Climate | Baseline control over temperature, rainfall and ice cover |
| Large herbivores | Grazing and browsing pressure on plants |
| Natural wildfires | Background disturbance shaping forests and open areas |
| Human fire use | Additional, targeted burning beyond natural lightning fires |
| Human hunting | Direct reduction of large animal populations |
By comparing the output of these simulations with real pollen records from lakes and peatlands, the researchers could see which combinations best matched the ancient plant patterns. Scenarios without humans simply failed to fit the data.
Why this matters for today’s rewilding debates
The study arrives at a time when Europe is investing heavily in rewilding projects, from reintroducing bison to allowing forests to regrow on abandoned farmland. Many of these efforts rest on the idea of restoring a “natural” state that existed before heavy human land use.
The new work suggests that any baseline stretching back tens of thousands of years already includes human influence. Prehistoric people were moving animals around indirectly through hunting, and steering plant communities through fire and disturbance.
Restoration projects may need to think less about going back to a human-free past, and more about recovering dynamic, human-influenced mosaics.
That does not weaken arguments for conservation. Instead it sharpens them: landscapes can be resilient and diverse when humans act as careful ecosystem partners, rather than as purely extractive forces.
What “megafauna” and “pollen data” really mean
Two technical terms sit at the heart of the research: “megafauna” and “pollen records”. Both are worth unpacking, because they shape how scientists read the ancient past.
Megafauna usually means land animals over about 45–50 kilograms, roughly the size of a large sheep or bigger. In this study it includes:
- Elephants and rhinoceroses
- Bison and aurochs (the wild ancestors of cattle)
- Large deer and wild horses
These species engineer habitats simply by eating, trampling and moving. Take them out of an ecosystem and trees spread differently, grasslands shrink or expand and fire patterns shift.
Pollen data comes from cores drilled deep into lake beds or peat bogs. Each layer in a core corresponds to a time period, and contains pollen grains blown or washed in from surrounding plants. By identifying the pollen types and dating the layers, scientists reconstruct which plants dominated at particular times. That long record becomes the test for climate and ecosystem models.
Future simulations and what they might reveal
The team behind this research now wants to turn their tools on other regions, especially the Americas and Australia. Those continents had no Neanderthals or earlier human relatives; they were only settled by Homo sapiens in the last 60,000 years or so.
That difference offers a natural experiment. By comparing late Ice Age ecosystems with and without humans, researchers can trace how quickly megafauna vanished and how plant communities adjusted.
Running these simulations for multiple time slices could show whether the European pattern holds elsewhere: modest early human effects, followed by stronger change once populations grew and toolkits improved.
For readers watching current climate and biodiversity trends, there is a sobering lesson. Even small populations with simple technology can redirect ecosystems if they are persistent and spread across large areas. Modern societies, armed with fossil fuels and global trade, amplify that power many times over.
At the same time, the study hints at a more hopeful scenario. If hunters using stone tools and fire could co-exist with diverse megafauna and varied landscapes for tens of thousands of years, then managing today’s environments with care, humility and good data may still leave room for both thriving nature and human communities.