Holocene fires in the central European lowlands and the role of humans
Abstract
A major debate concerns the questions of when and to what extent humans affected regional landscapes, especially land cover and associated geomorphological dynamics, significantly beyond natural variability. Fire is both, a natural component of many climate zones and ecosystems around the globe and also closely related to human land cover change. Humans clearly affected natural fire regimes and landscapes in the most recent centuries, acting as prime ignition triggers and later fire suppressors, while Holocene trends in sedimentary charcoal have been mainly associated with climatic factors and partly with Neolithic land cover change. However, little is known since when Paleolithic to Neolithic fire use affected natural landscapes beyond small spatial and temporal scales. Here, we discuss onset and extent of human-driven fires superimposed on natural Holocene landscape transformation for the central European lowlands (CEL), a landscape of low natural flammability and long human history. We present composites of sedimentary charcoal records as new human impact proxies for periods when natural conditions (climate and vegetation) limited wildfires. Together with climate model output and land cover reconstructions from pollen, we find that fire was naturally important only during the early Holocene. The onset of human-driven fires beyond natural fires appeared scale-dependent. Sub-regional fire maxima indicate fire use by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, already 8,500 years ago. Regionally, fire marks the Neolithisation onset at 6,500 years (western CEL) and 4,000 years ago (eastern CEL). During the last millennium, farming intensification drove fire up to early Holocene levels across all CEL. Fire activity reduced only in the highly fragmented landscape of northern Germany during the last centuries. As compilations of soil erosion records even mirror Holocene fire trends, we conclude that past human land cover change could have affected sub-regional landscapes more and earlier than previously thought. *CEL Holocene fire team: Karolina Bloom 3, Achim Brauer 1, Walter Dörfler 4, Ingo Feeser 4, Angelica Feurdean 5, Laura Gedminienė 6, Thomas Giesecke 7, Susanne Jahns 8, Monika Karpińska-Kołaczek 9, Piotr Kołaczek 10, Mariusz Lamentowicz 10, Małgorzata Latałowa 11, Katarzyna Marcisz 10, Milena Obremska 12, Anna Pędziszewska 11, Anneli Poska 13, Kira Rehfeld 14, Migle Stančikaitė 6, Normunds Stivrins 13,15, Joanna Święta-Musznicka 11, Marta Szal 9, Jüri Vassiljev 13, Siim Veski 13, Agnieszka Wacnik 16, Dawid Weisbrodt 11, Julian Wiethold 17, Michał Słowiński 12 3 University of Szczecin, Poland; 4 Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany; 5 Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; 6 Nature Research Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; 7 University of Göttingen, Germany; 8 Heritage Management and Archaeological Museum of the State of Brandenburg, Zossen, Germany; 9 University of Białystok, Poland; 10 Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland; 11 University of Gdańsk, Poland; 12 Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland; 13 Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia; 14 British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK; 15 University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia; 16 Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków, Poland; 17 Institut national des recherches archéologiques préventives (Inrap), Direction Grand Est, Metz, France
- Publication:
-
EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- April 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018EGUGA..20.9629D