A team of archaeologists and geographers from The University of Manchester have found evidence of a decline in large animal diversity in Ancient Britain.
A new program of radiocarbon dating shows that the most species rich footprint beds at Formby Point are much older than previously thought. The beds show a period from 9000 to 1000 years ago.
The footprint beds show that, as global sea levels rose rapidly after the last ice age around 9000 to 6000 years ago, humans formed part of a rich intertidal environment. It was reclaimed by the North Sea in this period.
Humans dominate the Neolithic period and later footprint beds, as well as a fall in large mammal species richness.
The area close to the shoreline was a hub of human and animal activity in the first few thousand years after the last ice age. Large animals were abundant in the coastal landscapes of Europe. The northwest European Serengeti was a biodiversity hot spot.
The decline in large mammals in the footprint record could be the result of a number of factors, including habitat loss due to sea level rise, as well as hunting pressures from a growing human population. Questions of the conventional archaeological and fossil records are posed by this new record.
One of the largest concentrations of prehistoric tracks can be found in the Formby footprint beds. There are no well-dated fossil records for this period in the landscape around the Irish Sea basin. This is the first time that footprints have been used to reconstruct a faunal history.
Professor Jamie Woodward, who is an author of the study, said that assessing the threats to habitat and biodiversity posed by rising sea levels is a priority for our times. Sea level rise can change coastal landscapes.
More information: Alison Burns et al, Footprint beds record Holocene decline in large mammal diversity on the Irish Sea coast of Britain, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01856-2
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