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, and the Early Holocene (12,000-8,000 years ago) when Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of our own species, Homo sapiens, occupied the continent. According to Phys.org, the research incorporated interdisciplinary knowledge from ecology, archaeology, and palynology to create the first continental-scale simulation of ancient human impact on vegetation patterns. The results paint a picture far removed from the romanticized notion of humans living in harmony with pristine nature.
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Quantifying Ancient Human Impact
The research team, led by first author Anastasia Nikulina and including Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University's biology department, employed cutting-edge computational modeling coupled with artificial intelligence optimization algorithms to run thousands of scenarios. By comparing simulation results with actual pollen data from archaeological sites across Europe, researchers calculated the precise extent of human influence on vegetation cover during both time periods. The findings proved startling: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers could have influenced up to 47% of plant type distribution across the continent, while Neanderthals impacted approximately 6% of plant type distribution and 14% of vegetation openness.
"The study paints a new picture of the past," explained Professor Svenning.
"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 computer modeling revealed that prehistoric humans influenced European landscapes through two primary mechanisms: deliberate burning of trees and shrubs to create more open habitats, and hunting of large herbivores that fundamentally altered grazing patterns and vegetation succession.
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European megafauna that coexisted with prehistoric humans including elephants, bison, and rhinoceroses. (Public Domain)
Neanderthals as Ecosystem Engineers
During the Last Interglacial period, Europe supported extraordinarily rich megafauna populations including straight-tusked elephants weighing up to 13 tons, rhinoceroses, bison, aurochs, wild horses, and numerous species of deer. Neanderthals coexisted with these massive animals and, contrary to assumptions about primitive hunting capabilities, successfully hunted even the largest species. "The Neanderthals did not hold back from hunting and killing even giant elephants. And here we're talking about animals weighing up to 13 tons," Svenning noted.
However, Neanderthal hunting had both direct and indirect ecological consequences. While they reduced herbivore populations through predation, their relatively small population size meant they never eliminated the large animals entirely or completely disrupted their ecological role. Fewer grazing animals resulted in more vegetation overgrowth and denser forest cover in some areas, while human-set fires opened clearings in others. This dual impact - hunting pressure combined with controlled burning - created a mosaic landscape pattern distinct from what climate and natural processes alone would have produced.
The research team emphasized that Neanderthals represented a fundamentally different type of ecological force compared to later Homo sapiens populations. Their limited numbers and less sophisticated hunting technology meant their impact, while measurable, remained constrained. "The effect was limited, because the Neanderthals were so few that they did not eliminate the large animals or their ecological role - unlike Homo sapiens in later times," Svenning explained, highlighting a crucial distinction in human-environment interactions across different hominin species.
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Reconstruction of an Eastern European hunter-gatherer from the Mesolithic period. (Public Domain)
Mesolithic Transformation of European Landscapes
The Early Holocene period presented a dramatically different ecological scenario. The megafauna extinction that followed Homo sapiens' global expansion had already eliminated or drastically reduced populations of the largest herbivore species. Elephants, rhinoceroses, and other massive grazers had vanished from most of Europe, fundamentally altering the continent's ecological dynamics. Into this transformed landscape came Mesolithic hunter-gatherers - more numerous, better organized, and equipped with more sophisticated technology than their Neanderthal predecessors.
These Mesolithic populations wielded unprecedented influence over European vegetation patterns. Their extensive use of fire to manage landscapes, combined with intensive hunting of remaining large herbivores like bison, aurochs, and deer, reshaped plant communities across nearly half the continent. Archaeological evidence from sites like Star Carr in England demonstrates that these hunter-gatherers maintained organized settlements, managed resources strategically, and actively curated their surrounding environments to enhance food availability and ease of hunting.
"The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe's ecosystems," Svenning emphasized. The study's findings align with ethnographic observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, which frequently employ controlled burning and selective hunting to manage landscapes. However, this research goes further by quantifying the continental-scale impact of such practices tens of thousands of years ago, providing concrete evidence for what had previously been theoretical speculation.
Map of case studies indicating possible vegetation burning by LIG and Early–Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers. (Nikulina et al. /PLoS ONE)
Interdisciplinary Innovation and Future Research
Nikulina highlighted the study's methodological innovations as critical to its success.
"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 lets us run a large number of scenarios and identify the most possible outcomes," she explained.
The research team assembled pollen data from 17 case study sites across Europe, including locations in Germany, England, Spain, Poland, Sweden, Norway, and Estonia. These sites, spanning both the Last Interglacial and Early Holocene periods, provided the empirical foundation against which simulation results were tested. The interdisciplinary collaboration brought together specialists in ecology, archaeology, geology, and palynology from institutions in the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom, demonstrating the complex expertise required to reconstruct ancient human-environment interactions.
Despite this study's groundbreaking findings, both Nikulina and Svenning acknowledged significant gaps remain in understanding prehistoric human landscape impacts. "Even without fire, hunter-gatherers changed the landscape simply because their hunting of large animals made the vegetation denser," Svenning noted, pointing to the complex feedback loops between human activities and ecological processes. The researchers suggest that similar computational approaches applied to other continents, particularly North and South America and Australia, which lacked earlier hominin species before Homo sapiens arrival, could provide valuable comparative data about landscapes with and without long-term human influence.
Top image: A prehistoric family representation - both Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers actively shaped landscapes. Source: Gorodenkoff/Adobe Stock
By Gary Manners
References
Nikulina, A., Svenning, J-C., et al. 2025. On the ecological impact of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Europe: Early Holocene (Mesolithic) and Last Interglacial (Neanderthal) foragers compared. PLOS One. Available at: https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328218
Staff Writer. 2025. Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers shaped European landscapes long before agriculture, study reveals. Phys.org. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-neanderthals-mesolithic-hunter-european-landscapes.html
