european

Revolutionary research challenges longstanding assumptions about pristine prehistoric European landscapes, revealing that both Neanderthals and later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers actively transformed their environments thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. Using advanced computer simulations combined with extensive pollen analyses, an international team of researchers has quantified the ecological impact of these ancient populations, demonstrating that humans were not passive inhabitants but active architects of European ecosystems. The findings, published in PLoS ONE, offer a dramatically new perspective on humanity's relationship with the natural world and suggest that the concept of "untouched wilderness" in prehistoric Europe may be fundamentally flawed. The study focused on two critical warm periods: the Last Interglacial (125,000-116,000 years ago) when Neanderthals were Europe's sole human inhabitants