Katharine MacDonald’s research while affiliated with Leiden University and other places

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Publications (17)


Hunter-gatherer impact on European interglacial vegetation: A modelling approach
  • Article

January 2024

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230 Reads

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4 Citations

Quaternary Science Reviews

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Katharine MacDonald

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This article focuses on hunter-gatherer impact on interglacial vegetation in Europe, using a case study from the Early Holocene (9200–8700 BP). We present a novel agent-based model, hereafter referred to as HUMLAND (HUMan impact on LANDscapes), specifically developed to define key factors in continental-level vegetation changes via assessment of differences between pollen-based reconstruction and dynamic global vegetation model output (climate-based vegetation cover). The identified significant difference between these two datasets can be partially explained by the difference in the models themselves, but also by the fact that climate is not the sole factor responsible for vegetation change. Sensitivity analysis of HUMLAND showed that the intensity of anthropogenic vegetation modification mainly depended on three factors: the number of groups present, their preferences for vegetation openness around campsites, and the size of an area impacted by humans. Overall, both climate and human activities had strong impacts on vegetation openness during the study period. Our modelling results support the hypothesis that European ecosystems were strongly shaped by human activities already in the Mesolithic.


Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior

February 2023

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254 Reads

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35 Citations

Science Advances

Straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene, present in Eurasian landscapes between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago. The occasional co-occurrence of their skeletal remains with stone tools has generated rich speculation about the nature of interactions between these elephants and Pleistocene humans: Did hominins scavenge on elephants that died a natural death or maybe even hunt some individuals? Our archaeozoological study of the largest P. antiquus assemblage known, excavated from 125,000-year-old lake deposits in Germany, shows that hunting of elephants weighing up to 13 metric tons was part of the cultural repertoire of Last Interglacial Neanderthals there, over >2000 years, many dozens of generations. The intensity and nutritional yields of these well-documented butchering activities, combined with previously reported data from this Neumark-Nord site complex, suggest that Neanderthals were less mobile and operated within social units substantially larger than commonly envisaged.


Neumark-Nord 2 (Germany) HP 7 sequence, with lithological units and the archaeological find levels (Sier et al., 2011), the stratigraphical distribution of charcoal particles, carbonised seeds (Kuijper, 2014), arboreal (AP) and non-arboreal pollen (NAP) and data regarding vegetation openness (Pop & Bakels, 2015); correlation of archaeological layers containing fire-related findings with vegetation openness episodes shown in red
Pollen analysis (pollen percentage of trees, shrubs, upland herbs and Corylus avellana) from Weimar-Niederweimar II.2 profile and macrofossil evidence (percentage of wood, charcoal and remains from plants occupying open, disturbed and nutrient-rich areas) from different palaeochannel fills at Weimar-Niederweimar (Germany). The sequence shown here is dated to the Younger Dryas (11,640 BP, gravel layer), Preboreal (11,400–10,970 BP, gravel layer) and Boreal periods (10,420–9,510 BP, sand/gyttja and gyttja layers); phases of Early Mesolithic anthropogenic impact within the Lahn valley area are shown in red (after Bos & Urz, 2003)
Pollen analysis (pollen percentage of Corylus, Melampyrum, Succisa, Potentilla-type and microcharcoal) and NPP evidence (percentage of Gelasinospora, Neurospora, Sporormiella) from a profile at North Gill 5B (North York Moors within England and Wales). This evidence reflects post-disturbance phases after burning and intensive grazing during the Late Mesolithic at North Gill. The profile consists of amorphous peat resting on sand at 100 cm. The inferred age of the basal peat lies within the Late Mesolithic based on dates available for a section a few tens of metres away from North Gill 5 (5,270 BP) and higher section of this site (4,540 BP at 73 cm) (after Innes & Blackford, 2003). Red shows the phase with the highest herbivore concentrations; this follows a phase with intensive burning
Tracking Hunter-Gatherer Impact on Vegetation in Last Interglacial and Holocene Europe: Proxies and Challenges
  • Article
  • Full-text available

September 2022

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1,054 Reads

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23 Citations

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

We review palaeoenvironmental proxies and combinations of these relevant for understanding hunter-gatherer niche construction activities in pre-agricultural Europe. Our approach consists of two steps: (1) identify the possible range of hunter-gatherer impacts on landscapes based on ethnographic studies; (2) evaluate proxies possibly reflecting these impacts for both the Eemian (Last Interglacial, Middle Palaeolithic) and the Early–Middle Holocene (Mesolithic). We found these paleoenvironmental proxies were not able to unequivocally establish clear-cut differences between specific anthropogenic, climatic and megafaunal impacts for either time period in this area. We discuss case studies for both periods and show that published evidence for Mesolithic manipulation of landscapes is based on the interpretation of comparable data as available for the Last Interglacial. If one applies the ‘Mesolithic’ interpretation schemes to the Neanderthal record, three common niche construction activities can be hypothesised: vegetation burning, plant manipulation and impact on animal species presence and abundance. Our review suggests that as strong a case can be made for a Neanderthal impact on landscapes as for anthropogenic landscape changes during the Mesolithic, even though the Neanderthal evidence comes from only one high-resolution site complex. Further research should include attempts (e.g. by means of modelling studies) to establish whether hunter-gatherer impact on landscapes played out at a local level only versus at a larger scale during both time periods, while we also need to obtain comparative data on the population sizes of Last Interglacial and Holocene hunter-gatherers, as these are usually inferred to have differed significantly.

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Fig. 1. Location of Neumark-Nord and other Last Interglacial archaeological sites relative to the maximum ice extents of the Saalian and Weichselian glaciers. Modified after (18).
Fig. 2. Overview of archaeological and environmental data for Neumark-Nord 2. Neumark-Nord 2, HP 7/10 section, with depth in centimeters, PAZ (for duration in years, see table S1), composite pollen percentage diagram (see also Fig. 3), charcoal particles >1 mm/5 liters of sediment, lithological units, and archaeological find levels. For a detailed description of this section, see Supplementary Text and fig. S1.
Landscape modification by Last Interglacial Neanderthals

December 2021

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660 Reads

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42 Citations

Science Advances

Little is known about the antiquity, nature, and scale of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer impact on their ecosystems, despite the importance for studies of conservation and human evolution. Such impact is likely to be limited, mainly because of low population densities, and challenging to detect and interpret in terms of cause-effect dynamics. We present high-resolution paleoenvironmental and archaeological data from the Last Interglacial locality of Neumark-Nord (Germany). Among the factors that shaped vegetation structure and succession in this lake landscape , we identify a distinct ecological footprint of hominin activities, including fire use. We compare these data with evidence from archaeological and baseline sites from the same region. At Neumark-Nord, notably open vegetation coincides with a virtually continuous c. 2000-year-long hominin presence, and the comparative data strongly suggest that hominins were a contributing factor. With an age of c. 125,000 years, Neumark-Nord provides an early example of a hominin role in vegetation transformation.


Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution

August 2021

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498 Reads

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74 Citations

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Control of fire is one of the most important technological innovations within the evolution of humankind. The archaeological signal of fire use becomes very visible from around 400,000 y ago onward. Interestingly, this occurs at a geologically similar time over major parts of the Old World, in Africa, as well as in western Eurasia, and in different subpopulations of the wider hominin metapopulation. We interpret this spatiotemporal pattern as the result of cultural diffusion, and as representing the earliest clear-cut case of widespread cultural change resulting from diffusion in human evolution. This fire-use pattern is followed slightly later by a similar spatiotemporal distribution of Levallois technology, at the beginning of the African Middle Stone Age and the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic. These archaeological data, as well as studies of ancient genomes, lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods. Furthermore, it is likely that the large-scale social networks necessary to transmit complicated skills were also in place. Most importantly, this suggests a form of cultural behavior significantly more similar to that of extant Homo sapiens than to our great ape relatives.


Table 1.  Polymorphisms for which the low-risk gene variant observed in Neanderthal and/or Denisovan is the ancestral allele.
Column headers: Nea = Neanderthal; Den = Denisovan; Chimp = Chimpanzee; Gor = Gorilla; Ust?-Ishim/Mal?ta (MA-1)/Anzick-1 = Siberian/Siberian/North-American pre-Holocene hunter-gatherer; NE1/BR2 = Neolithic/Bronze Age Hungarian individual; Saqqaq = Palaeo-eskimo; Aus = Aboriginal Australian. Cell shading: light grey = low-risk ancestral variant; dark-grey = high-risk derived variant.
Fig 1.  Distribution of the number of low-risk loci (0 high-risk alleles) and loci with 1 or 2 high-risk alleles within the global population of the 1000 Genome Project [59].
The average number of loci carrying 0/(1 or 2) high-risk alleles was 16/16 and coincided with the median of this distribution. The relative position of the Altai Neanderthal and the Denisovan hominin high-coverage genomes are indicated, as well as the genome of the oldest available anatomically modern human, that of a 45,000 year old individual from Ust?-Ishim. Three SNPs (rs2292596, rs56318881, and rs9282861) analysed in this study were not covered by the 1000 Genome Project variant data and were therefore not included in this analysis. For each of the GSTM1 and GSTT1 loci in the ancient hominin genomes, being possibly homozygous or heterozygous low-risk (S2 Table), a contribution of 1 high-risk allele was conservatively counted in. Details in Section B in S1 Text.
Table 2.  Polymorphisms for which the low-risk gene variant observed in Neanderthal and/or Denisovan is a derived allele.
Column headers and cell shading as for Table 1.
Table 3.  Polymorphisms for which the high-risk gene variant was observed in both Neanderthal and Denisovan.
Column headers and cell shading as for Table 1. Ancestral variants in the ancient hominin and human lineages are indicated by a thick-lined black box.
Fire Usage and Ancient Hominin Detoxification Genes: Protective Ancestral Variants Dominate While Additional Derived Risk Variants Appear in Modern Humans

September 2016

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203 Reads

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13 Citations

Studies of the defence capacity of ancient hominins against toxic substances may contribute importantly to the reconstruction of their niche, including their diets and use of fire. Fire usage implies frequent exposure to hazardous compounds from smoke and heated food, known to affect general health and fertility, probably resulting in genetic selection for improved detoxification. To investigate whether such genetic selection occurred, we investigated the alleles in Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans at gene polymorphisms well-known to be relevant from modern human epidemiological studies of habitual tobacco smoke exposure and mechanistic evidence. We compared these with the alleles in chimpanzees and gorillas. Neanderthal and Denisovan hominins predominantly possess gene variants conferring increased resistance to these toxic compounds. Surprisingly, we observed the same in chimpanzees and gorillas, implying that less efficient variants are derived and mainly evolved in modern humans. Less efficient variants are observable from the first early Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers onwards. While not clarifying the deep history of fire use, our results highlight the long-term stability of the genes under consideration despite major changes in the hominin dietary niche. Specifically for detoxification gene variants characterised as deleterious by epidemiological studies, our results confirm the predominantly recent appearance reported for deleterious human gene variants, suggesting substantial impact of recent human population history, including pre-Holocene expansions.


Figure 4. Use of fi re in managing national park landscape and fauna in the Netherlands, De Sallandse Heuvelrug. Photo by Jap Smits. A color version of this fi gure is available online. 
Figure 5. Objective versus vegetation structure (number of examples). 
Figure 6. Fire size versus vegetation structure (number of examples). 
Figure 7. Objective versus fi re size ( a ), gender ( b ), age group ( c ), and group size ( d ) in percentages. 
Burning the Land

May 2015

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391 Reads

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88 Citations

Current Anthropology

Archaeological indications for off-site burning by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers present intransigent interpretive problems; by contrast, burning practices by recent hunter-gatherers are well documented. Here, we present a systematic global inventory of extant burning practices—including the reasons for burning and the environmental setting of firing activities—and also discuss their visibility in the archaeological record. This inventory is based on ethnographic and historical texts. In historical times, off-site fire was used for a wide range of purposes, irrespective of age and gender, with significant advantages for its producers. While the reasons given for burning can vary between individuals, in the longer term, many hunter-gatherer firing practices created more mosaic types of environments than would have occurred naturally. The historical visibility of hunter-gatherer burning activities contrasts with the relative invisibility of such practices in the contemporary archaeological record, highlighting the difficulty of analyzing past use of fire. On the basis of its ethnographic importance, we suggest that diverse off-site fire use is as old as the regular use of fire. New multiproxy data from well-sampled sequences, analyzed at a local scale, is needed to test this hypothesis.


Burning the land - An ethnographic study of non-domestic fire use by recent and sub-recent foragers and implications for the interpretation of past fire practices in the landscape

September 2013

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53 Reads

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48 Citations

Archaeological indications for off-site burning by Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers present difficult interpretive problems. By contrast, individual burning practices by recent hunter gatherers are well-documented. We present the first systematic global inventory of extant non-domestic burning practices based on ethnographic and historical texts. Our database includes stated reasons for burning, who effectively participates and the environmental settings of firing activities. The large number of cases in the database vary widely in geographical location, type of activity and date of observation. We also ranked the quality of the sources. The ‘historical visibility’ of hunter-gatherer burning activities contrasts with the relative ‘invisibility’ of such practices in the current archaeological record, highlighting the difficulty of analyzing past use of fire. We analysed promising case studies from the literature with the aim of assessing the potential to extend the study of hunter-gatherer off-site burning into the past.



Citations (15)


... The observed trend of occupation of lower ranked habitats as population increased should not be misinterpreted as occupied higher ranked habitats reaching any sort of carrying capacity (Boserup, 1965), but rather that their suitability has declined as a function of population density, resulting from intra-habitat resource depletion and competition, to that of the suitability of lower ranked, previously unoccupied habitats. There is strong evidence for human impacts on vegetation and tree coverage at the continental scale following the LGM (Kaplan et al., 2016;Nikulina et al., 2024), which may act as a proxy for the negative density dependence of habitat suitability. When faced with the decision of where to be on the landscape, people are occupying the habitat which is most suitable. ...

Reference:

The effects of climate and population on human land use patterns in Europe from 22ka to 9ka ago
Hunter-gatherer impact on European interglacial vegetation: A modelling approach
  • Citing Article
  • January 2024

Quaternary Science Reviews

... It remains true that the bulk of the evidence about LP and MP subsistence points to a strategy based mostly on the hunting of mediumand large-bodied ungulates. But the variation that is emerging along the margins tells us a great deal about hominin behavior and adaptability: the exploitation of large carnivores supports the idea of fur procurement for clothing during the LP (Verheijen et al. 2022), repeated hunting of forest elephants suggests that Neanderthals either were less mobile or temporarily had larger populations than previously thought (Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al. 2023), and the evidence from small game, especially leporid, procurement points to occasional dietary flexibility and use of fur in specific ecological or regional contexts. Taken together, we are moving beyond the "bad old days" of asking whether past hominins could do the bare minimum to survive and replacing them instead with a much more interesting and nuanced picture that centers the adaptive success of early hominins in their own right. ...

Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behavior
  • Citing Article
  • February 2023

Science Advances

... While unquestionably robust, such approaches cannot answer all questions about landscape evolution, sometimes because there is insufficient high-resolution material (typically sedimentary) available to analyze, sometimes because it is uncertain what particular strata represent. But perhaps most profoundly, such approaches cannot humanize the past; they cannot tell us how particular events may have affected particular groups of humans, perhaps by either constraining or broadening their activities, and, conversely, they cannot tell us what role humans may have played in landscape evolution (perhaps through de-vegetation or the intentional modification of landforms) and their motivations for doing so (Nikulina et al. 2022;Prober et al. 2016;Rosen et al. 2017). ...

Tracking Hunter-Gatherer Impact on Vegetation in Last Interglacial and Holocene Europe: Proxies and Challenges

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

... Different benzenebased molecules have been demonstrated to correspond to anthropogenic vs. natural forest fires in semi-arid regions, related to ignition timing and fuel load of the different sources of fire in Neolithic contexts (Armas-Herrera et al. 2019;Kaal et al. 2008). However, heretofore, landscape-scale fire inferences from Paleolithic contexts have been made primarily from charcoal and pollen proxies (e.g., Roebroeks et al. 2021;Thompson et al. 2021) instead of PAHs. As of yet, no studies from Central Asia have used these fire markers to understand Paleolithic fire scenarios. ...

Landscape modification by Last Interglacial Neanderthals

Science Advances

... 用火 [12][13][14][15] 、人属物种首次移居更高纬度地区 [16][17][18][19] 等。通过对这些中更新世古人类类群的 研究,我们可以更好地审视现代人在体质特征、行为模式、社会组织形式等方面的起源 和演化细节。 目前已有的化石证据显示,这些新类型的古人类于约30万年前出现在东亚 [20] ,并 于约10万年前消失 [21] 。这一人群的典型代表有距今约30万-20万年的华龙洞人 [20] 、大 荔人 [22][23][24][25] 、金牛山人 [26][27][28] 、马坝人 [29][30][31] ,距今22.4万-16.1万年的许家窑人 [32] 和距今12.5 万-10.5万年的许昌人 ...

Middle Pleistocene fire use: The first signal of widespread cultural diffusion in human evolution

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

... And when it comes to causal generics such as "smoking causes cancer" and "dogs bite people, " they function as guidelines for caution in actions (Sterken, 2015). Archaeologically and anthropologically, detached communication about the relations between animals, their tracks and their behavior is difficult without using some form of generics (MacDonald and Roebroeks, 2013). Although speculative, this connection could be an explanation of why generics are so central in language. ...

Neanderthal linguistic abilities: an alternative view
  • Citing Chapter
  • July 2013

... Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, on the other hand, "spent" their improvements in kill switch function on tolerating increased E resulting from foraging for food at fire-combusted, PAH-contaminated sites (chimpanzees, bonobos, Homo habilis) (37,38), or harnessing fire as a tool (Homo erectus, Homo sapiens) (39) (Figure 7). In addition to foraging at fire combusted sites, modern chimpanzees have also been shown to prefer cooked over raw foods (40,41). These facts, when analyzed through the lens of the lex naturalis equation, indicated that there were additional "improvements" to the primate kill switch beyond those that we had already identified. ...

Fire Usage and Ancient Hominin Detoxification Genes: Protective Ancestral Variants Dominate While Additional Derived Risk Variants Appear in Modern Humans

... This suggests that there is a close correlation between fire-sensitive vegetation and forest fires, albeit it cannot be excluded that hunter-gatherers had some impact, too. From ethnography, it is well known that hunter-gatherers may induce small-scale controlled fires to selectively promote food production of certain species (hazel, berries, etc.) or opening and maintaining forest clearings to attract game and improve mobility or visibility (Mellars 1976;Bishop et al. 2015;Scherjon et al. 2015). Unfortunately, it remains extremely difficult to determine the exact origin of past forest fires on the basis of charcoal evidence. ...

Burning the land - An ethnographic study of non-domestic fire use by recent and sub-recent foragers and implications for the interpretation of past fire practices in the landscape
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • September 2013

... In the Swedish Kingdom, and especially in Finland, slash-and-burn agriculture was practised throughout the Middle Ages and continued until the early twentieth century (Myllyntaus et al. 2002). It is an extensive form of cultivation that has been, and still is, used by rural populations all over the world (Kleinman et al. 1995;Scherjon et al. 2015;Tedim et al. 2015;Tomson et al. 2015). It includes cutting and burning forested or bush-covered areas, the ash from which boosts soil fertility, which allows productive cultivation for one or several years. ...

Burning the Land

Current Anthropology