Managing wilderness? Holocene-scale, human-related disturbance dynamics as revealed in a remote, forested area in the Czech Republic

Abstract

In the lowlands and uplands of Central Europe, which were inhabited continuously from the very start of the Holocene to the present times, it is difficult to find territories suitable for investigation of natural baselines. For this reason, we picked the complicated rocky terrain of one upland area in NE Bohemia called Adrspach because, based on the absence of archeological finds, it was supposed to have never been deforested or managed by people. The remote and inhospitable character of this particular area further encouraged this assumption. To our great surprise, however, high-resolution pollen analyses, supplemented by analyses of non-pollen palynomorphs and microscopic charcoals reveals that the local forest ecosystem had a dynamic development over entire Holocene. We were able to correlate this high-resolution understanding of vegetation successions with repeated fire disturbances. Was this fire disturbance dynamic natural? Subsequent archeological exploration and excavation in the area brought unexpected evidence, pointing to rather continuous human presence throughout most of the Holocene. From the Early Mesolithic to the Late Neolithic, available evidence suggests a hunter-gatherer mode of resource management. From the start of the Late-Holocene (ca 4 ka BP), the occurrence of coprophilous fungal spores and secondary anthropogenic pollen indicators suggest this area was impacted by recurrent domestic animal grazing. Testing this approach also in other remote forested areas of Central Europe, we argue, can have far-reaching implications for understanding long term human-environment agency by transforming our understanding of alternative subsistence and land use strategies during prehistory. At the same time, this can significantly alter existing concepts used in Central European nature conservation strategies, which tend to be based on an underlying assumption that our work challenges – the survival of little impacted wilderness at the Holocene scale.

Origin of the central European steppe flora: insights from palaeodistribution modelling and migration simulations

“…Many species now typical of steppe may have also occurred in the herb layers of open‐canopy forests of the mid‐Holocene (Chytrý et al 2010) or in woodland–grassland mosaic landscapes (Fyfe et al 2015). Moreover, during most of the Holocene, central European lowlands were settled by people who may have kept parts of the landscape more open so that light‐demanding species could survive (Jamrichová et al 2017, Pokorný et al 2022). After the arrival of the first Neolithic farmers and the subsequent expansion of grasslands, these species probably spread from several small refugia scattered across central Europe and formed their current distribution ranges.…”

Disturbance and Succession in Early to Mid-Holocene Northern English Forests: Palaeoecological Evidence for Disturbance of Woodland Ecosystems by Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers

“…While Britain has most of the published evidence for Late Mesolithic fire disturbance of woodland ecosystems, there is a considerable body of evidence from mainland Europe suggesting that the same type of fire-management of forests might well have been practiced across that much larger area, in both the Early and Late Mesolithic, and in both lowland and upland locations. Pollen evidence of woodland canopy opening in western Europe has long been reported [173] but more recently higher resolution palynology has revealed many examples of forest burning, some of which have been attributed to deliberate burning and management [174] and have stimulated discussion of fire and forager-landscape relationships similar to that in Britain [175][176][177][178][179][180][181][182], often with a similar focus on the encouragement of Corylus and its value as a food resource [179,[183][184][185][186][187][188], and even the transformation of the forest to hazel 'plantations' [188]. While some examples of fire disturbance have been reported from southern Europe [189][190][191] and from Scandinavia [192][193][194] it is in central and northern Europe that most examples occur, in particular in woodland and marshes around wetlands in the North European Plain of The Netherlands, Germany, Poland and the Baltic States [180,[195][196][197][198][199][200][201][202][203] situations that were unlikely to have supported natural wildfires during the early to mid-Holocene.…”