Neandertals took Stone Age landscaping to a previously unrecognized level. Around 125,000 years ago, these close human relatives transformed a largely forested area bordering two central European lakes into a relatively open landscape, archaeologist Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues say. Analyses of pollen, charcoal, animal fossils and other material previously unearthed at two ancient lake basins in Germany provide the oldest known evidence of hominids reshaping their environments, the team reports in the Dec. 17 Science Advances.
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