- Geological time and the place of humans in it
- Megafaunal extinctions
- Use of fire in prehistory
- Elm and the Landnam theory
- Local and regional vegetation change
- Prehistoric global change
Environmental history
People and nature in prehistory (P. Szabó)
Lecture structure
05 People and nature in prehistory
Supplementary reading
- Ellis, E. C., Gauthier, N., Goldewijk, K. K., Bird, R. B., Boivin, N., Díaz, S., ... and Watson, J. E. (2021) People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118: e2023483118.
- Fyfe, R.M., Woodbridge, J. and Roberts, N. (2015) From forest to farmland: pollen‐inferred land cover change across Europe using the pseudobiomization approach. Global Change Biology 21: 1197-1212.
- Kaplan, J.O., Pfeiffer, M., Kolen, J.C. and Davis, B.A. (2016) Large scale anthropogenic reduction of forest cover in Last Glacial Maximum Europe. PloS ONE 11: e0166726.
- Koch, P.L. and Barnosky, A.D. (2006) Late Quaternary extinctions: state of the debate. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37: 215-250.
- LEMOINE, R.T., BUITENWERF, R., & SVENNING, J. C. (2023) Megafauna extinctions in the late-Quaternary are linked to human range expansion, not climate change. Anthropocene 44: 100403.
- Mottl, O., Flantua, S. G., Bhatta, K. P., Felde, V. A., Giesecke, T., Goring, S., ... and Williams, J. W. (2021) Global acceleration in rates of vegetation change over the past 18,000 years. Science 372: 860-864.
- Parker, A.G., Goudie, A.S., Anderson, D.E., Robinson, M.A. and Bonsall, C. (2002) A review of the mid-Holocene elm decline in the British Isles. Progress in Physical Geography 26: 1-45.
- Scherjon, F., Bakels, C., MacDonald, K., and Roebroeks, W. (2015). Burning the land: An ethnographic study of off-site fire use by current and historically documented foragers and implications for the interpretation of past fire practices in the landscape. Current Anthropology 56: 299-326.
Further interesting and supplementary links
Video materials