Greening a lost world: Paleoartistic investigations of the early Pleistocene vegetation landscape in the first Europeans' homeland

The scarcity of pictorial reconstructions focusing on Quaternary flora and vegetation prompts a reevaluation of traditional zoocentrism in future paleoartistic research. Here we present paleoartistic renderings depicting vegetation landscapes around the Orce Archaeological Zone (OAZ), encompassing sites dating from 1.6 to 1.2 million years ago during the Early Pleistocene of the Guadix-Baza Basin in southern Spain. Four pieces are based on fossil pollen data from Venta Micena 1 (VM1), Barranco León (BL), and Fuente Nueva 3 (FN3). The artwork considers altitudinal belt distribution, taxonomic and structural diversity, extinct taxa in the Iberian Peninsula post-Early Pleistocene, and those previously extinct at higher latitudes in Europe. This essay visually represents the coexistence of mesophytic, thermophytic, and xerophytic plant communities within a glacial refugium of woody species. Lastly, employing a non-conventional iconographic approach, we portray a female Homo individual in the forest refugium to draw up on possible adaptive traits of these early Europeans.