2021/10/18 by Erle C. Ellis · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Archaeological Research and Protection
paper · doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-010822
openalex publication_date 2021/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate. This review examines recent evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, environmental history, and model-based reconstructions that reveal a planet largely transformed by land use over more than 10,000 years. Although land use has always sustained human societies, its ecological consequences are diverse and sometimes opposing, both degrading and enriching soils, shrinking wild habitats and shaping novel ones, causing extinctions of some species while propagating and domesticating others, and both emitting and absorbing the greenhouse gases that cause global climate change. By transforming Earth's ecology, land use has literally paved the way for the Anthropocene. Now, a better future depends on land use strategies that can effectively sustain people together with the rest of terrestrial nature on Earth's limited land.