History The first human traces can be dated back to the neolithicum (4000 to 2000 B. C.), but it is supposed that the neolithic people only visited the area. Earliest settlements were established during the Bronze Age and especially during the Iron Age. The people of the Iron Age Period were driven away by ancient Germans, so the area wasn't habtited anymore until Frankian settlers moved in. The large clearing period in the early middle ages (800 till 1000 A.D) brought settlers even in the higher regions of the Rhön mountains. It is assumed that todays ratio between wood and agricultural area was laid during this period. In this time the ratio between arable land and grassland was 2 : 1. Industrial centers existed around, but not in the Rhön area. Because of this many people left the area. Since the early middle age some important roads were crossing the Rhön area: Frankfurt-Erfurt (E-W), Grabfeld-Hessen (SE-NW) and Fulda-Bad Salzungen (SW-NE). Recently published pollen-analysis data from a peat bog in the Thuringian Rhön showed that the Bronze Age settlers found an oak dominated forest whereas the beech provided two thirds or more of the tree pollen from around 500 B.C. until the late middle ages. The centuries until around 1800 were characterised by declining forests due to heavy use. After that afforestation with fir and pine was reported. After the second world war and during the 1970s and 1980s the higher areas in the west part of the Iron Curtain were afforested because the agricultural landuse was declined. The structure in agriculture, especially as can be found in Bavaria, fostered the development of fallow land: Most of the farms are small-scale family enterprises, half of them below 10 hectares (figures from 1999 for the Bavarian districts Bad Kissingen and Rhön-Grabfeld). The better part of all farms is operated by part-time or hobby farmers, whose main source of income is industrial or other work outside agriculture. Agriculture in the Thuringian part is done by highly professional large-scale farms of several thousand hectares, the successors of the German Democratic Republic's collective farms (LPGs). The agricultural cooperative in Kaltensundheim is dedicated to extensive use and ecological production in accordance with needs of the biosphere reserve since the early 1990s, made possible by support from the European Union and the state of Thuringia. The Rhön was approved as a biosphere reserve by the UNESCO in 1991.