Pollen-based evidence of human presence is crucial for reconstructing human history. However, information on the morphology of pollen grains of global food plants and regional pollen-based human indicators is scattered in the literature, leading to the risk of overlooking important evidence of human presence. To address this issue, we first compiled a comprehensive overview of 354 major food plants worldwide, creating a paleoecology-friendly format that includes their family, vernacular name, earliest known use, environmental preference, and geographical region. Moreover, we identified the sources of illustrations of their pollen grains for 209 out of 273 different genera of globally relevant food plants in 10 selected pollen atlases. Secondly, we compiled all human indicators from pollen-based paleoecological literature in Latin America (based on 750 references), providing an overview of 212 single-pollen type indicators and identified 95 crucial combinations of pollen types as "human indices", and their corresponding references. Our review datasets aids in distilling human evidence from numerous fossil pollen records worldwide.
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Tropical forests are changing in composition and productivity, probably in response to changes in climate and disturbances. The responses to these multiple environmental drivers, and the mechanisms underlying the changes, remain largely unknown. Here, we use a functional trait approach on timescales of 10,000 years to assess how climate and disturbances influence the community-mean adult height, leaf area, seed mass, and wood density for eight lowland and highland forest landscapes. To do so, we combine data of eight fossil pollen records with functional traits and proxies for climate (temperature, precipitation, and El Niño frequency) and disturbances (fire and general disturbances). We found that temperature and disturbances were the most important drivers of changes in functional composition. Increased water availability (high precipitation and low El Niño frequency) generally led to more acquisitive trait composition (large leaves and soft wood). In lowland forests, warmer climates decreased community-mean height probably because of increased water stress, whereas in highland forests warmer climates increased height probably because of upslope migration of taller species. Disturbance increased the abundance of acquisitive, disturbance-adapted taxa with small seeds for quick colonization of disturbed sites, large leaves for light capture, and soft wood to attain fast height growth. Fire had weak effects on lowland forests but led to more stress-adapted taxa that are tall with fast life cycles and small seeds that can quickly colonize burned sites. Site-specific analyses were largely in line with cross-site analyses, except for varying site-level effects of El Niño frequency and fire activity, possibly because regional patterns in El Niño are not a good predictor of local changes, and charcoal abundances do not reflect fire intensity or severity. With future global changes, tropical Amazonian and Andean forests may transition toward shorter, drought- and disturbance-adapted forests in the lowlands but taller forests in the highlands.
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