How Neanderthals changed their environments

Agriculture first started around 10000 years from now and perhaps that may be the time when humans started clearing the forests for agriculture. But could the clearing of forests and manipulating the environment has happened earlier than the agricultural societies?

Authors Roebroeks and colleagues published a paper in Science Advances in December 2021 throwing light on this aspect of the modification of the environment by Neanderthals. According to them the clue to this puzzle came from a 125,000-year-old Neanderthal site of Ne1.

2umark-Nord in Germany. Neanderthals, our closest relatives, lived there and their acti1vities at the site resulted in vast repertoire of remains of hunted animals, burned charcoal, stone tools, animal bone tools and evidence of fire. They must have cleared the area to create open spaces by burning fires at the periphery. Mainly being hunter gatherers, they lived on meat and also consumed the collected fruits and nuts thus including carbohydrates in the food.

To reconstruct the basin where Neanderthals lived, it is concluded that this site has a vegetation of herbs and therefore it is not a closed canopy forest indicating the openness of the area. Evidence of fire remains at different places may be due to the activity of Neanderthals or of natural origin, is a point of debate, however, it had resulted in open spaces around the lakes. There is sufficient evidence of Neanderthals keeping this as an open area for at least 2,000 years. And these areas show marked activity of human ancestors. It can be speculated that these cleared areas may be growing wild varieties of grains. These scientists have hypothesized that the Neanderthals by constantly inhabiting lake basins have changed the ecosystems for their personal use and may be this is the first time in natural history when hominin activity has resulted in changing the ecosystem. In the similar lakes in that areas, where there was no evidence of Neanderthal activity, the forests were mainly intact pointing out that Neanderthals were responsible for the ecosystem change.