For decades, we believed that outside ice ages Europe was mostly covered by dense forest before the arrival of modern humans. Now, a new study shows that there was far more open and semi-open ...

For over 20 million years, the landscape of Europe has been a tree-rich mosaic of grasslands, scrubs and more or less open woodlands with an abundance of wildflowers. This is the conclusion of a new ...

Big animals, like the elephants on the illustration, probably helped keep part of the European landscape open or semi-open during last interglacial period. That created variation in the vegetation and ...