Pliocene European landscape.
Márton Zsoldos.
Europe’s landscapes have a history far older, richer and more dynamic than anything envisaged by the authors of Genesis. Long before humans cleared fields, planted crops or managed woodlands, changing communities of plants and animals were shaping the continent’s vegetation. The countryside was neither a finished creation nor a permanent backdrop against which life played out. It was itself the changing product of ecological interactions operating over millions of years.
A review published in Biological Conservation, by Szymon Czyżewski and colleagues, examines that history across approximately 23 million years. The researchers challenge the familiar picture of prehistoric Europe as an almost continuous expanse of dark, closed-canopy forest. Their synthesis instead supports a widespread mosaic of grassland, scrub, open woodland and denser forest patches, with large herbivores playing an important role in maintaining this variety.
This reconstruction rests on several complementary sources of evidence, including fossil pollen, plant remains, charcoal, animal teeth and ancient environmental DNA. Together, these records allow researchers to investigate landscapes that no human observer ever saw. The result is not a picture of one habitat remaining unchanged for 23 million years, but of recurring landscape patterns within a long history of ecological change.
The animals were active participants in that history. Feeding and disturbance by large herbivores helped maintain open vegetation; their disappearance could alter the balance between trees and open ground. Later, people introduced further changes through hunting, burning, farming and livestock grazing. What we now regard as “natural” therefore requires historical explanation: today’s landscape is not necessarily a reliable guide to the environments in which its species evolved.
For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty begins with the timescale. Here is an environmental history extending millions of years before the supposed creation of the entire Universe, reconstructed from physical evidence rather than ancient storytelling. The study does not investigate creationist claims, but its findings belong to the immense body of evidence those claims must somehow explain away. Compressing this history into a few thousand years does not explain it; it discards the chronology that makes the evidence intelligible.
There is also a lesson in how science works. Even the appealing image of an uninterrupted primeval forest must yield when the evidence supports a more complicated picture. Revising that picture matters beyond academic debate: decisions about restoring habitats should take account of the long ecological history that produced their biodiversity. Understanding nature requires us to investigate its past, not assume that the present preserves an original design.
How Do We Reconstruct a Landscape That Disappeared Millions of Years Ago? No one has photographs of Europe’s Miocene countryside, but ancient environments have left physical traces. Palaeoecology — the study of past ecosystems — uses these traces to reconstruct vegetation, animal communities and environmental change. Each kind of evidence provides a different part of the picture.The research paper was accompanied by an Aarhus University article
Fossil pollen: which plants were present?
Pollen grains have resistant outer walls and can survive in suitable sediments for millions of years. Their distinctive shapes often allow researchers to identify the plant family or genus that produced them. Changes in pollen assemblages through successive sediment layers reveal changes in the surrounding vegetation.
However, tree pollen does not automatically mean continuous, dense forest. Plants differ greatly in how much pollen they produce and how far it travels. Wind-pollinated trees can contribute disproportionately to a sample, while some flowering plants leave a much weaker signal. Researchers must therefore account for pollen production, dispersal and preservation when estimating vegetation cover.
Plant remains: evidence closer to the source
Seeds, fruits, leaves and wood provide another record of vegetation. These larger remains, known as plant macrofossils, can sometimes identify plants more precisely than pollen. They often provide a more local signal, although water and other processes can transport them. Combining pollen with macrofossils helps distinguish vegetation near a sampling site from plants growing farther away.
Animal remains: clues to habitats and feeding
Fossil insects and mammals offer additional evidence because different species have different habitat requirements. An assemblage containing animals associated with open ground can qualify an interpretation based mainly on abundant tree pollen.
Herbivore teeth are particularly informative. Tooth shape and wear provide clues to feeding habits, while stable-isotope measurements can help investigate diet and environmental conditions. These indicators require careful interpretation: no single tooth supplies a complete map of the surrounding landscape.
Charcoal and ancient DNA: disturbance and biological presence
Charcoal particles record past burning. Their abundance, size and distribution can help researchers investigate fire activity, although charcoal alone does not establish whether a fire was started by lightning or people.
Where preservation permits, ancient environmental DNA recovered from sediments can identify organisms that left little recognisable fossil material. DNA preservation is strongly dependent on age and conditions, however. It supplements suitable parts of the record; it is not available throughout the entire 23-million-year interval.
Why several independent clues matter
Every method has limitations. Pollen can travel considerable distances; larger fossils may be scarce; charcoal can be transported; and DNA degrades. Confidence increases when different indicators support the same interpretation within a securely dated sequence.
The aim is therefore not to declare “forest” whenever tree pollen appears. It is to distinguish among closed woodland, scattered trees, grassland and mixtures of these habitats — and to establish how their distribution changed through time. A landscape mosaic can persist as a broad pattern even while its species, climate and individual patches change.
This is the approach taken in the Biological Conservation review: reconstructing Europe’s ecological history by comparing complementary evidence, rather than treating today’s landscapes as an unchanged template for the distant past.
Dense, dark forests in Europe are a modern phenomenon
For over 20 million years, the landscape of Europe has been a tree-rich mosaic of grasslands, scrubs and more or less open woodlands with an abundance of wildflowers. This is the conclusion of a new and comprehensive study of Europe’s vegetation history – a study that suggests modern afforestation runs counter to the continent’s long-term ecological trajectory.
Imagine walking through pristine nature in central Europe 100,000 – or even a million – years ago. If you picture a dark, dense primeval forest, where sunlight barely reaches the forest floor, then you have taken a wrong turn. Not geographically, but temporally.
You simply have not travelled far enough back in time. Because that image resembles a modern production forest more than past reality.
But if you picture scattered woodlands combined with colorful flowery meadows, where lots of different birds and butterflies are thriving – you’re probably on the right track.
From nature’s perspective, the dense forests are a very recent phenomenon.
A new, comprehensive study led by Aarhus University shows that Europe’s landscapes over the past more than 20 million years have predominantly been a mosaic: a mixture of grasslands, scrub and woodlands of varying density. A light-filled, flower-rich open woodland shaped by grazing animals as a decisive ecological force – not a dark closed-canopy forest.
The study has just been published in Biological Conservation.
Reforestation at odds with nature
The study shows that current reforestation practices are on the wrong track – both here in Denmark, where subsidies are only granted for planting dense forests, and elsewhere in Europe. This will not only be harmful for biodiversity; it will be in direct contradiction to the type of ecosystems that Europe’s species have evolved in over millions of years.
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, senior author
Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO)
Department of Biology
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark.
Svenning adds, that the so-called “closed-forest paradigm” for decades has dominated nature management and our understanding of what is natural: the idea that dense forests with closed canopies were Europe’s natural baseline before human intervention.
All available palaeoecological evidence
The new study takes a significant step beyond previous research. Whereas earlier studies have primarily focused on relatively recent periods in the past, the researchers here bring together all available palaeoecological evidence covering the entire period from the Miocene epoch (which began around 23 million years ago) to the pre-industrial era.
The study is based on a large synthesis of independent lines of evidence. The researchers reviewed palaeoecological studies covering the last 23 million years and combined multiple scientific “proxies” that reveal past vegetation structure and ecological processes. These included pollen records, plant macrofossils, charcoal particles from ancient fires, stable-isotope analyses of herbivore teeth and bones, fossil insects and mammals, and ancient environmental DNA preserved in sediments.
Each type of proxy offers its own perspective, but together they let us see whether the landscapes were covered by dense forests, open grasslands, or a mix of the two. By combining these datasets across time – from the Miocene to the pre-industrial era – we could trace long-term changes in vegetation and the role of large herbivores with much greater confidence than earlier studies that used only one method.
Szymon Czyzewski, lead author
Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO)
Department of Biology
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark.
The conclusion is clear: across this long period, the typical landscape was a dynamic tree- and flower-rich mosaic, where large wild herbivores such as elephants, rhinoceroses, aurochs and bison kept vegetation semi-open and diverse – and this was the case in temperate climates similar to those prevalent in Europe today, as well as in warmer and in cooler climates.
A continent without large wild herbivores
Another central conclusion is that present-day Europe is, in ecological terms, highly unusual.
The ecosystems we see in Europe today lack the large wild herbivores that not only shaped landscapes but also sustained its biodiversity for millions of years. The most dramatic shift has largely taken place within the last hundred years, when traditional extensive grazing disappeared from large parts of the landscape.
Szymon Czyzewski.
The researchers also show that many species now regarded as characteristic of cultural landscapes – such as larks, jackdaws or the European hamster – are likely to have their evolutionary roots in the open woodland systems of the past. And the wild poppies, that we now mostly associate with fields, grew in herbivore-disturbed places within the ancient woodlands.
This suggests that the sharp division between “forest” and “open habitats” that characterises modern conservation practice is a modern invention.
Implications for reforestation and restoration
The findings have direct implications for nature management and biodiversity across temperate Europe – precisely at a time when forests are being planted in the name of climate mitigation and biodiversity.
If the goal is to restore ecosystems resembling those in which Europe’s species evolved and are still adapted to, the study indicates that uniform, dense forests are not the answer.
Instead, restoration efforts should place greater emphasis on creating and maintaining mosaics of woodland and open habitats – not least through the restoration of natural-living large herbivores.
Professor Jens-Christian Svenning.
The study thus reinforces growing evidence from earlier research from the same research environment: Europe’s past was lighter, more heterogeneous and more strongly shaped by large animals than we have long assumed.
One might say that the idea of the dark, dense primeval forest does not collapse overnight – but it loses yet another supporting trunk.
Publication:
The picture that emerges is of a continent with a deep ecological history: changing communities of plants and animals, shifting patterns of woodland and open ground, and landscapes shaped by interactions extending over millions of years. That history is incompatible with the young-Earth creationist claim that the world and its inhabitants originated just a few thousand years ago. The problem is not merely that the dates disagree with a literal reading of Genesis. It is that the evidence reveals a succession of ecological changes for which that abbreviated biblical chronology has no credible room.
Invoking a global flood does not resolve the discrepancy. Any proposed alternative must explain the evidence itself, including the changing associations of plants and animals and their occurrence within independently investigated geological sequences. Simply assigning everything to a biblical catastrophe supplies a conclusion in advance of the investigation. It does not explain why the evidence supports a history so much longer and more complicated than the story permits.
This review also illustrates something creationist polemics routinely misrepresent about science. The researchers are challenging an influential view of Europe’s natural vegetation: the assumption that dense, closed-canopy forest provides the appropriate baseline. They do so by bringing together evidence that supports a more varied landscape, with large herbivores helping to maintain woodland–grassland mosaics. An established interpretation is being questioned through the ordinary processes of scientific research.
That does not mean one review settles every question, or that its conclusions should become a new orthodoxy. The extent of woodland openness, its variation between regions and periods, and the relative importance of herbivores and other influences remain matters for investigation. Scientific consensus earns its authority from the evidence supporting it, and remains open to revision when a better explanation emerges. Debate about the details of Europe’s ancient landscapes does not, however, make their millions of years of history disappear.
The contrast with religious dogma is therefore methodological as well as chronological. Science permits even a familiar and persuasive account to be challenged, provided the challenge survives scrutiny. Biblical literalism makes fidelity to an ancient account the condition that any explanation must satisfy. Here, scientists are asking what Europe’s landscapes were actually like, even if the answer requires them to revise a cherished picture. A belief that cannot be corrected by evidence has no comparable means of discovering that it is wrong.
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