Before the advent of agriculture, was the whole world covered with forest?
Upvote:0
Grass is a plant that has evolved to help cause, and itself survive, fires. Most trees don't deal well with fire, particularly in places where there's a dry season. So even without humans, yes grass existed as a plant, and there are various biomes where it naturally takes over.
This might be better understood with this graph based on temperature and annual rainfall.
Humans in fact (Hominina to be exact) are viewed by many as one of the two branches of primates to evolve specifically adapted to grasslands when the African Savannah first developed (the other being Baboons). The main problem grasslands pose primates is how to get around without trees to swing from. Baboons solved this by going almost fully quadrapedal. Our branch solved it by going bipedal.
So it would be more accurate to say we didn't make the grass, the grass made us.
Upvote:3
EUROPE DURING THE LAST 150,000 YEARS
This site, which includes many maps and references, describes how the vegetation cover of Europe has changed over the past 150,000 years. The map shown below shows Europe as it would be sans agriculture today.
Note that there are several types of forest, as well as several types of open land, such as tundra and steppe. Europe lacks large deserts.
This is the vegetation cover which would exist in the absence of agriculture, and which does exist at present in a highly fragmented form. Forest (green) predominates across most of the region, with deciduous forest across central and western Europe, and conifer forest (blue-green) towards the north and east. A steppe (grassland) belt exists in the south-east (yellow), with areas of forest-steppe (pink). Tundra (orange) exists in the far north where the climate is too cold year-round for trees to grow, and mediterranean vegetation - with hard-leaved evergreen shrubs and trees - predominates in parts of southern Europe (red).
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