Central Europe had a pleasant climate 120,000 years ago.
The ice masses of the Saale Ice Age, which had penetrated as far as northern Hesse thirty thousand years earlier, had long since retreated into the High Arctic and it would be thousands of years before they came back in the Vistula Glacial - the last ice age to this day.
During this so-called Eem warm period, early humans of the species
Homo neanderthalensis lived
a lakeshore in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, around ten kilometers south of Halle.
And as archaeologists working with Will Roebroeks from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands now write in a study published in the journal “Science Advances”, they left behind not only stone tools and bones from eaten hunted prey, but also permanent changes in their environment.
Specifically, they transformed the then relatively densely forested area into a landscape with fewer trees, also using fire
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The researchers conclude this from a comparison of archaeological and paleoecological findings from the “Neumark-Nord” site with other locations in the area east of the Harz Mountains, where the same climatic conditions prevailed at the time. It is therefore unlikely that environmental indicators such as deviating patterns in the concentration of plant pollen can be traced back to climate change. For the Neumark-Nord site, located in a lignite opencast mining area, there are indications of a presence of Neanderthals that has lasted for over two millennia.
This is not the first example of still demonstrable environmental changes by members of the genus Homo. As early as the early 2000s, the hypothesis of the American paleoecologist William Ruddiman caused a sensation that the beginning of agriculture in the Neolithic Age had already changed the greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth's atmosphere. The extinction of large mammal species in North America and Australia has also been linked to the arrival of humans there. And recently, studies on the shores of Lake Malawi in southeastern Africa showed that people there used fire 85,000 years ago to transform forest areas into a landscape with more open vegetation.
However, the current work by Roebroeks and his colleagues concerns the oldest documented environmental change that can be attributed to hominids and the first that was not caused by anatomically modern humans, but rather by Neanderthals.
This can then also be interpreted as an argument for the fact that H. neanderthalensis did not differ in its behavior from its cousin, Homo sapiens, at least in this respect.