Method used to produce the sedimentary DNA datasets: DNA sequences were produced by using g (5'-GGGCAATCCTGAGCCAA-3') and h (5'-CCATTGAGTCTCTGCACCTATC-3') primers for plants and MamP007F (5'-CGAGAAGACCCTATGGAGCT-3') and MamP007R (5'-CCGAGGTCRCCCCAACC-3') primers and the human-blocking primer (5'-GGAGCTTTAATTTATTAATGCAAACAGTACCC-3') for mammals. The sequences have been produced by the Illumina technology (HiSeq instrument). The bioinformatic treatment of the sequences was operated applying the Obitool program (Boyer, F. et al. OBITOOLS:aUNIX-inspired software package for DNA metabarcoding. Mol. Ecol. Resour. 16, 176–182 (2016)) and following the procedure described in Giguet-Covex et al. New insights on lake sediment DNA from the catchment: importance of taphonomic and analytical issues on the record quality. Scientific Reports. 9, 14676 (2019) (DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50339-1). Then, other filtering processing were performed as also described in Giguet-Covex et al. 2019. These second treatments allow for removing 1) taxa assigned to a reference taxon at <95 % of sequence identity, 2) potential contaminations (based on sampling, extraction and PCR controls, and recognition of exotic taxa) and 3) stochastic detections. Several analytical replicates by samples were performed (8 for both, the plants and mammals). Data are presented in number of positive replicates by sample. A replicate is considered as positive if more than 5 sequences are detected.