History of deforestation

The history of deforestation dates back to pre-historical times and was practiced by societies on a small scale even before our civilization began ( Flannery, T (1994). The future eaters. Melbourne: Reed Books). Evidence of the first conscious removal of trees appears in the Mesolithic period or middle stone age some 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. During this time, it is presumed that trees were removed to open up closed forest areas to make ecosystems which were more favourable for game animals. Mesolithic foragers in Europe started using fire in 7000BC to make openings for deer and wild boar which would improve their hunting efforts. Later, fire became a prime tool for the clearance of land for agricultural crops. This period serves as a benchmark for the development of human technology and ended with an introduction into farming (www.eh-resources.org/timeline_prehistory.html#meso).

Before moving on, the website Archaeolink (http://www.archaeolink.co.uk/Neolithic-Age.html) contains a timeline of significant pre-industrial deforestation events, which has been provided below, for a better understanding of the theme and its progression up to now.

“Throughout most of history, humans were hunter gatherers who hunted within forests. In most areas, such as the Amazon, the tropics, Central America, and the Caribbean. In Ancient Greece, Tjeered van Andel and co-writers summarized three regional studies of historic erosion and alluviation and found that, wherever adequate evidence exists, a major phase of erosion follows, by about 500-1,000 years before the introduction of farming in the various regions of Greece, ranging from the later Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. The thousand years following the mid-first millennium BCE saw serious, intermittent pulses of soil erosion in numerous places.
Easter Island has suffered from heavy Soil Erosion in recent centuries, aggravated by agriculture and deforestation. Jared Diamond gives an extensive look into the collapse of the ancient Easter Islanders in his book Collapse. The disappearance of the island's trees seems to coincide with a decline of its civilization around the 17th and 18th century. He attributed the collapse to deforestation and over-exploitation of all resources.

The famous silting up of the harbor for Bruges, which moved port commerce to Antwerp, also followed a period of increased settlement growth (and apparently of deforestation) in the upper river basins. In early medieval Riez in upper Provence, alluvial silt from two small rivers raised the riverbeds and widened the floodplain, which slowly buried the Roman settlement in alluvium and gradually moved new construction to higher ground; concurrently the headwater valleys above Riez were being opened to pasturage.”