What would the German forest look like when the Romans first

>>2772382
Caesar describes the geography and culture of Germania in the Gallic wars.

Northern Europe looked more like Yukon or Siberia does now. Thick taiga forest.

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>>2772382
Wilder, more dense ad with much more variety of trees and bushes. Think Pacific North-West.
Definitely not what Gladiator had.
>Ancient forests in Germania consist of the same tree for miles

>>2773167
According to this guy they were actually more managed like groves. Most of Europe's forests were reforested after having been nearly gone at the start of the 20th century.
https://youtu.be/zVPUFMwm73Y

>>2773246
He's talking about the middle ages, I don't think the Germanic tribes in bumfuck nowhere in 9CE managed the woodland around them, especially if it wasn't the land immediately around their settlements.

>>2773274
Well considering it was a timber economy and the need for it which drove Romans there in the first place, coupled with the fact that the Germanics lived in scattered villages who also would have needed the wood, it probably wasn't too different from the middle ages. The practice endured up til the last century also.
He also says the hunter gatherers used slash and burn techniques to make clearings for hunting animals so there's a precedent for forest management since prehistory.

>>2773167

that looks like a modern forestal pinewood plantation instead of a natural forest but to be fair it'd be nearly impossible to find a filming location accurate to Europe circa 100AD

>>2773301

Augustus era tribal Germania would've been far less developed than say High Medieval England though. You have to consider the fact that Western Europe outside of Italy would've been at the height of its population and development around 1300. In fact, the population in many countries would take centuries to reach the same levels after the Great Famine and Black Death.

The population would've been considerably lower, more spread out and autonomous. Villages would've been more far apart and larger Medieval era settlements wouldn't have existed. You would't have had any large or complex forms of government binding and legislating the population.

A large reason for the practices Lindybeige names is the fact that Medieval society was massively overlegislated. There were laws for fucking everything and land and resource ownership was ridiculously meticulous. This is what caused peasants to strip the local commons of things they needed, which wouldn't have been the case in a considerably more primitive, egalitarian (in practice, not as a modern meme) and depopulated tribal confederacy.

File: Rezerwat_ścisły_w_Puszczy_Białowieskiej_7_(Nemo5576).jpg (3MB, 2592x1944px) Image search: [Google]

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>>2772382
>there is an extensive Wikipedia article specifically on the history of German forests
Pretty unexpected desu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Central_Europe

tl;dr Mostly primeval forest, cleared or disturbed to some degree around settlements. Beech or oak dominant on better soil, pine on worse, alder where there's stagnating water. Plenty more wetlands everywhere, later mostly or near entirely drained. Pollution-sensitive lichens would likely be common, unlike today.
Picture should be reasonably close, although it was taken in eastern Poland, an area with a significantly more continental climate. I could adjust my estimates if I knew whether the European climate was different at the time.

>>2772393
Taiga could have been there when the glaciers were still retreating, but by Roman times it would grow more or less where it does now.

>>2773167
Pacific Northwest is also a poor analogy thanks to being essentially a temperate rainforest as well as much greater age. An ancient German forest would have been a lot less humid, with less biomass, consisting of mostly deciduous trees, with no epiphytes covering them. Lower species richness too, because the woods of Europe were shafted harder by the glaciers than American ones. Many taxa still present across the ocean were driven to complete extinction.