MANCHESTER (Commonwealth Union) – History has often provided valuable lessons to the present generations and we have all heard the saying “History repeating itself”.
The University of Manchester archaeologists and geographers have found that 100s of ancient animal and human footprints seen on a beach in Merseyside noted a huge reduction in large animal diversity in ancient Britain. The new findings, appearing in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, which includes a new program of radiocarbon dating indicating that the most species-rich footprint beds at Formby Point are far more ancient than previously assumed. The beds record a key period in the natural history of the UK from Mesolithic to Medieval times.
The footprint beds indicate that, as world sea levels increased rapidly after the last ice age around 9000 to 6000 years ago, humans became part of rich intertidal ecosystems alongside aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, and beaver, as well as the predators wolf and lynx. From the other side of Britain, Doggerland was retrieved by the North Sea in this time. In the agriculture-based areas that continued, human footprints dominate the Neolithic time and later footprint beds, alongside a striking fall in huge mammal species richness.
The scientists demonstrate that the area close to the modern shoreline was a center of human and animal movements in the initial 1000 years following the last glacial period. The vast coastal landscapes of the European Mesolithic were rich ecosystems swarming with bigger animals. This was a biodiversity center with bigger grazers and predators of a northwest European Serengeti.
Author of this study Professor Jamie Woodward said: “Assessing the threats to habitat and biodiversity posed by rising sea levels is a key research priority for our times – we need to better understand these processes in both the past and the present.”
