Finding the carbon footprint of early humans

Humans want to control everything around them, changing the world to suit their own needs - and that might be what separates us from other species. Many scientists think that this old habit is also the primary driver of today’s climate change. 

Recent paleoanthropologist research has revealed that even hundreds of thousands of years ago, human activity resulted in changing the environment, although on a much smaller scale than in modern times. 

In Germany, since the 1980s, scientists have worked on a site called Neumark-Nord, close to the city of Leipzig, researching the remains of Neanderthals, an earlier human species. The Neanderthals, which were classified as being part of Homo Sapiens by some commentators,were gone about 40,000 years ago possibly thanks to climate change. 

The Neanderthals, who inhabited large areas across Eurasia, apparently liked Neumark-Nord, a forested area with many small lakes, partly due to its mild temperatures, settling there about 125,000 years ago. 

During their 2000-year presence in the area, the Neanderthals turned Neumark-Nord into an open field, apparently destroying trees to impose their own living standards. 

“Upon their leaving, the forest closed in again,” said Wil Roebroeks, a professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who is also the leading author of the recent study on how the Neanderthals changed the environment in Neumark-Nord. 

“It adds an important aspect to early human (including Neanderthals) behavior, with them impacting ecosystems very far into the past, even though we do not know whether this was intentional behavior intended to make and keep the landscape open,” the professor said. 

Even though a small element of the Neanderthals lived in the region, their footprint on the ecosystem was clear compared to regions nearly 30 miles away from Neumark-Nord, where scientists could not find any trace of the extinct species. 

While in Neumark-Nord forests closed around the open areas after the Neanderthals left, they are still not as dense as the region at large, where the Neanderthals did not live, scientists found. There are not any significant climate differences between the two regions to make an impact on the thickness of forests, they also said. 

By burning campfires regularly, the Neanderthals blackened seeds and consumed wood as they hunted animals, changing the area’s natural evolution. All this happened when there was no evidence of any formal communal civilisations like villages or cities. 

While it has been established in theory that the Neanderthals had a carbon footprint, it is nowhere near what it is today. Current climate change is leading to effects like global warming, and is largely triggered by human activity like the burning of fossil fuels. It is not a natural trend and is taking place at a rate much faster than at any period in history.