A new study shows that Neanderthals did not shy away from hunting even very large animals, such as the prehistoric elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tons. The impact of Neanderthals and hunter-gatherer peoples on nature turns out to have had a far greater influence on shaping the landscape of what we now know as Europe.
Photo: Wikimedia, AI
The past is a minefield for creationism because it becomes increasingly impossible to shoehorn reality into a 6,000–10,000-year timescale, or to maintain the fantasy of humans and animals appearing suddenly, without ancestry, only a few millennia ago. The more we learn about prehistory, the more creationists are forced either to dismiss the evidence or pretend it does not exist. Their difficulty is that their childish view of reality is rooted in the best guesses of ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists, who knew nothing of the world beyond their narrow horizons and understood nothing of the sciences that now inform our understanding of the universe around us.
In a paper published last October in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by Anastasia Nikulina (Leiden University and Durham University), and including Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University, argue that Neanderthals — and later Homo sapiens — were already instrumental in shaping the European landscape long before agriculture transformed it. The most significant drivers of change were hunting of the megafauna and the widespread use of anthropogenic fire.
And of course, this explanation incorporates something creationism cannot successfully accommodate within its preferred mythology: the existence of an archaic human species that predated Homo sapiens in Eurasia by several hundred thousand years. It also rests upon a history of climatic change in Europe that makes sense only within the context of a world vastly older than creationist mythology can allow.
The team reached their conclusions after an extensive analysis of pollen records from two warm periods in European history: one between 125,000 and 116,000 years ago, and the other between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. By comparing these results with computer simulations modelling the effects of climate change, large herbivores, and natural fires alone — and then adding the impacts of human hunting and deliberate burning — they found that the human-influenced models provided the best fit to the pollen data.
Background^ Neanderthals, Fire, Megafauna — and Europe Before Farming. Creationists often imagine the European landscape as something essentially “natural” until farming began a few thousand years ago. But the palaeoecological evidence paints a very different picture: humans were already shaping ecosystems tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of years before agriculture.The research and its implications are explained further in a recent news release from Aarhus University’s Department of Biology.
Neanderthals as ecological agents
Neanderthals were not passive cave-dwellers surviving at the mercy of nature. They were highly adapted Ice Age humans who lived across Eurasia for more than 300,000 years. They hunted large game, exploited diverse habitats, and almost certainly influenced local environments long before the arrival of modern humans.
Megafauna and landscape change
During the last interglacial and the later post-glacial period, Europe was home to an extraordinary array of large herbivores, including:
- mammoths
- woolly rhinoceroses
- steppe bison
- giant deer (Megaloceros)
- wild horses and aurochs
These animals were major “ecosystem engineers”, keeping forests open through grazing, browsing, and trampling. When human hunting pressure reduced their populations, vegetation patterns shifted — allowing woodland to expand in some areas and altering entire ecological communities.
Anthropogenic fire: humans as fire-users
Fire was not merely a natural phenomenon in prehistoric Europe. Both Neanderthals and later Homo sapiens used fire deliberately:
- for warmth and cooking
- to manage vegetation
- to drive game during hunts
- to create open, resource-rich habitats
Such burning would have produced long-term changes in plant cover, biodiversity, and the balance between forest and grassland.
Pollen as a window into deep time
Pollen grains preserved in lake sediments and peat bogs provide one of the most powerful records of past environments. Because different plants produce distinctive pollen, scientists can reconstruct:
- forest expansion or decline
- grassland prevalence
- fire frequency
- climatic shifts over tens of thousands of years
By comparing pollen data with computer models, researchers can test whether climate alone explains the changes — or whether humans must be included as a driving factor.
The creationist problem
None of this fits into the creationist myth of a recent world populated suddenly with fully formed species. Neanderthals, megafaunal extinctions, long-term climate cycles, and human-driven ecological change all testify to a deep and complex prehistory — one in which humans have been part of nature’s story for hundreds of millennia, not a few thousand years.
Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lit the fire: Humans shaped European landscapes long before agriculture
New research shows that humans left their mark on the landscape through hunting and the use of fire tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. The research paints a new picture of the past, say co-authors of the new study, Professor Jens-Christian Svenning from Aarhus University and PhD candidate and postdoctoral researcher Anastasia Nikulina from Leiden University and Durham University.
Imagine Europe tens of thousands of years ago: dense forests, large herds of elephants, bison and aurochs – and small groups of people armed with fire and spears. A new study shows that these people left a much clearer mark on the landscape than previously assumed.
Using advanced computer simulations, an international research team, which includes researchers from Aarhus University, has investigated how climate, large animals, fire and humans affected Europe’s vegetation during two warm periods in the past. By comparing the results with extensive pollen analyses from the same periods, the researchers have calculated how the different factors shaped vegetation cover.
The conclusion is clear: both Neanderthals and the later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had a strong impact on vegetation patterns in Europe – long before the advent of agriculture.
The study paints a new picture of the past. 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.
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, co-author
Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO)
Department of Biology
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark.
The results have just been published in PLOS One.
Humans displaced large animals
The researchers have focused on two warm periods in the past.
One is the Last Interglacial period around 125,000-116,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe. The second period is the time just after the last ice age, the Early Holocene, 12,000-8,000 years ago, at which time Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of our own species, Homo sapiens, lived here.
During the Last Interglacial period, Europe was home to a rich and varied megafauna, with elephants and rhinoceroses living side by side with bison, aurochs, horses and deer.
In the Mesolithic, the picture was different: The largest species had disappeared or their populations had been greatly reduced in size – due to the general loss of megafauna that followed in the wake of the spread of Homo sapiens across the globe.
New view of prehistoric man
Our simulations show that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers could have influenced up to 47% of the distribution of plant types. The Neanderthal effect was smaller, but still measurable – approximately 6% for plant type distribution and 14% for vegetation openness.
Dr Anastasia Nikulina, lead author
Faculty of Archaeology
Leiden University
Leiden, The Netherlands
And Department of Archaeology
Durham University
Durham, United Kingdom.
The human-induced effects on vegetation included both fire effects – burning of trees and shrubs – and a previously overlooked factor: the hunting of large herbivores.
The Neanderthals did not hold back from hunting and killing even giant elephants. And here we’re talking about animals weighing up to 13 tonnes. Hunting also had a strong indirect effect: fewer grazing animals meant more overgrowth and thus more closed vegetation. However, the effect was limited, because the Neanderthals were so few that they did not do eliminate the large animals or their ecological role – unlike Homo sapiens in later times.
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning.
Anastasia Nikulina and Jens-Christian Svenning both believe that the results offer a new perspective on the role of our ancestors in the natural landscape. In fact, it challenges the notion of an ‘untouched landscape’ in Europe before agriculture came along:The Neanderthals and the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active co-creators of Europe’s ecosystems.
">Professor Jens-Christian Svenning.
The study is consistent with both ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers and archaeological finds, but goes a step further by documenting how extensive human influence may have been tens of thousands of years ago – that is, before humans started farming the land.
Dr Anastasia Nikulina.
Interdisciplinary knowledge behind study
She highlights the interdisciplinary collaboration – between ecology, archaeology palynology (knowledge about pollen) – and the development of advanced computer models for simulating past ecosystems as strengths of the study.
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 optimisation algorithm from AI. That let us run a large number of scenarios and identify the most possible outcomes.
Dr Anastasia Nikulina.
The computer modelling made it clear to us that climate change, the large herbivores such as elephants, bison and deer, and natural wildfires alone cannot explain the changes seen in ancient pollen data. To understand the vegetation at that time, we must also take human impacts into account – both direct and indirect. Even without fire, hunter-gatherers changed the landscape simply because their hunting of large animals made the vegetation denser.
">Professor Jens-Christian Svenning.
Despite the new study, there are still gaps in our understanding of the early impact of humans on the landscape, says Jens-Christian Svenning.
Anastasia Nikulina and Jens-Christian Svenning emphasise that it would be interesting to do computer simulations of other time periods and parts of the world. North and South America and Australia are particularly interesting because they were never populated by earlier hominin species before Homo sapiens, and you are therefore able to compare landscapes in the recent past with and without human influence.
And although the large models paint a broad picture, detailed local studies are absolutely essential to improve our understanding of the way humans shaped the landscape in prehistoric times.
">Professor Jens-Christian Svenning.
Publication:
What this research highlights is that Europe’s landscapes were not some pristine, untouched backdrop awaiting the arrival of farmers a few thousand years ago. They were already being shaped, subtly but profoundly, by human hands — and by human fires — tens of thousands of years earlier. The continent’s forests, grasslands, and megafaunal communities were part of a dynamic ecological system in which both Neanderthals and later Homo sapiens played an active role.
And once again, this is exactly the sort of deep-time complexity that creationism cannot cope with. Neanderthals are not an optional footnote that can be ignored without consequence: they are an inescapable part of Eurasia’s history, occupying the landscape for hundreds of millennia before the first farmers ever planted a seed. Their existence alone demolishes the simplistic creationist fantasy of a recent world populated instantly by modern humans.
Nor can creationism make sense of the climatic cycles, ecological transitions, and long-term environmental feedbacks revealed by pollen records and palaeoclimate modelling. These are not the marks of a world only a few thousand years old, but of one with an immense and intricate history — written into sediments, fossils, and genomes alike.
The past, as ever, refuses to cooperate with mythology. It tells instead the far richer and far more interesting story of a planet shaped over deep time by evolution, climate, and the long, unbroken presence of humans within nature — not apart from it.
Reality has a very long memory, and creationism has nowhere left to hide from it.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Obscene, threatening or obnoxious messages, preaching, abuse and spam will be removed, as will anything by known Internet trolls and stalkers, by known sock-puppet accounts and anything not connected with the post,
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Remember: your opinion is not an established fact unless corroborated.