Grasslands and open forests (open natural ecosystems or ONEs) have been considered ‘wastelands’ since colonial times and targeted for restoration through tree planting. In this study, we use paleo-records to understand if Central India has a history of ONEs, and we find that the sites in our study region were often savanna in the last ten thousand years. This does upend the current understanding of the forests as a close canopy system that have recently been degraded into bec