[Alas Babylon!]

Not really.

Think of the Great Plains 200 years ago, teaming with great herds of buffalo, deer and pronghorn, or East Africa 100 years ago, teaming with wilderbeest, zebras, impalas and Cape buffalo.

In both cases, open grasslands came with huge herds of grass eaters.

These people—probably the early Indo-Europeans—hunted vast herds of reindeer, mammoth, bison, and horses on the tundra prairie.

The tundra grasslands turning back into forest would have decimated those herds.

[knarf]

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times. “The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

Did I misunderstand ?