Picture an elephant in Ice Age France. Now picture a Neanderthal taking it down with fire and spears. According to new research, those prehistoric hunters were not just surviving in Europe’s ancient woodlands: they were actively reshaping them, burning trees and culling megafauna on a scale that scientists are only now beginning to quantify.
A team of researchers from Aarhus University and institutions across Europe has used advanced computer simulations to analyze how humans influenced vegetation patterns during two distinct warm periods, tens of thousands of years before anyone planted a seed. The findings, published in PLOS One, challenge the romantic notion of pristine wilderness untouched by human hands.
“The study paints a new picture of the past,” says Jens-Christian Svenning, a biology professor at Aarhus University who co-authored the research. The team compared simulation results against extensive pollen data from the Last Interglacial period (125,000 to 116,000 years ago, when Neanderthals roamed Europe) and the Early Holocene period (12,000 to 8,000 years ago, when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of our own species lived there).
Fire and Hunting Reshaped the Land
The simulations revealed something unexpected: climate change, grazing by large herbivores like elephants and bison, and natural wildfires could not, by themselves, explain the vegetation patterns preserved in ancient pollen. Only when researchers factored in human activity, specifically hunting and human-set fires, did the models align with the fossil record.
“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.”
The scale of influence varied by era. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, the research suggests, may have shaped up to 47 percent of plant type distribution across Europe. Neanderthals had a smaller but still measurable footprint: roughly 6 percent on plant diversity and 14 percent on vegetation openness, according to study co-author Anastasia Nikulina.
Part of this impact came from fire. Burning trees and shrubs opened clearings in what would otherwise have been dense forest. But hunting played an equally important, if less obvious, role. Fewer grazing animals meant less browsing pressure, which paradoxically led to more closed, overgrown vegetation in some areas.
Even Giant Elephants Were Not Safe
The Neanderthals, it turns out, were capable of extraordinary feats. Svenning notes that they hunted and killed elephants weighing up to 13 tons. That is a staggering accomplishment for small groups armed with Stone Age technology. Yet their population remained sparse enough that they did not eliminate the megafauna or disrupt the animals’ ecological roles entirely.
By the Mesolithic period, the situation had changed. Many of the largest species had vanished or dwindled, part of the broader wave of megafaunal extinction that followed the global spread of Homo sapiens. The landscape was more open, and human influence more pronounced.
“The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe’s ecosystems.”
Nikulina highlights the study’s interdisciplinary approach, which combined ecology, archaeology, and palynology (the study of pollen) with AI-driven optimization algorithms to run thousands of scenarios. The team assembled spatial data spanning the entire continent over millennia, an unusually ambitious dataset for this type of research.
Even so, gaps remain. Svenning and Nikulina say future simulations should target other regions, particularly the Americas and Australia, where Homo sapiens arrived without earlier hominin predecessors. Those comparisons could reveal what landscapes look like with and without prolonged human presence. Local studies, they add, are critical to understanding how these broad trends played out in specific places.
The research does not just rewrite prehistory. It reframes it, suggesting that the idea of a wilderness unaltered by human hands may never have existed in Europe, at least not in the last 100,000 years.
PLOS One: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328218
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