ORCID

Abstract

Recent studies have highlighted evidence of human impact on landscapes dating back to the Late Pleistocene–long before the advent of agriculture. Quantifying the extent of vegetation transformations by hunter-gatherers remains a major research challenge. We address this challenge by comparing climate-based potential natural vegetation cover with pollen-based vegetation reconstructions for the Last Interglacial and the Early Holocene. Differences between these datasets suggest that climate alone cannot fully explain the pollen-based vegetation patterns in Europe during these periods. To explore this issue, we used an upgraded version of the HUMan impact on LANDscapes (HUMLAND) agent-based model (ABM), combined with a genetic algorithm, to generate vegetation change scenarios. By comparing ABM outputs with pollen-based reconstructions, we aimed to identify parameter values that yield HUMLAND results closely matching the pollen-based vegetation cover. The updated ABM covers a broad temporal range, and incorporates the effects of hunting on herbivores and their influence on vegetation regeneration. The results show that the combined effects of megafauna, natural fires, and climatic fluctuations alone lead to vegetation cover estimates that are inconsistent with paleoecological reconstructions. Instead, anthropogenic burning played a key role, with modelling results suggesting that European landscapes were already substantially modified by humans by the Early Holocene. In scenarios where human-induced burning was minimal or absent, foragers still shaped landscapes indirectly through hunting, which influenced herbivore densities and their impact on vegetation dynamics. Our study revealed that Neanderthals and Mesolithic humans influenced similar-sized areas around their campsites and shared comparable preferences for vegetation openness. Our results challenge the assumption that pre-agricultural humans had minimal ecological impact. Instead, this study provides strong evidence that both Neanderthals and Mesolithic foragers actively shaped European interglacial ecosystems, influencing vegetation dynamics long before agriculture.

Publication Date

2025-10-22

Publication Title

PLoS ONE

Volume

20

Issue

10 October

ISSN

1932-6203

Acceptance Date

2025-06-27

Deposit Date

2026-02-27

Funding

The research is financed through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the TERRANOVA project, No 813904, and supported by the Liveable Planet programme of Leiden University. The paper reflects the views only of the authors, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Jens-Christian Svenning was further supported by the VILLUM Investigator project “Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World”, funded by VILLUM FONDEN (grant 16549), Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO), funded by Danish National Research Foundation (grant DNRF173), and the Independent Research Fund Denmark Natural Sciences project MegaComplexity (grant 0135–00225B). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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