Abstract
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.
Highlights
This article reviews the global history of land use and its ecological consequences from the start of the current warm interglacial interval, 11,600 years ago, to the present day, revealing the deep cultural roots of Earth’s transformation through land use
Long-term changes in land use practices are understood as complex cultural traits coevolving together with the anthropogenic environments they produce, the genetic and epigenetic adaptations of crops, commensals, and other affected species, and the cultural, societal, and material changes of the societies engaging in these practices [17, 28, 33]
The first horticultural landscapes emerged around the world through diverse land use practices that ranged in intensity from woodland mosaics shaped by hunting, foraging, and shifting cultivation in multidecadal long fallow systems that allowed mature trees to regenerate, to densely populated village landscapes ringed by richly manured cereal and vegetable gardens [29, 42, 51, 68, 75]
Summary
Anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and others who situate human societies within the ecosystems they use, as integral components (e.g., 27, 28), increasingly interpret long-term changes in land use, including the emergence and coevolution of domesticated species and agricultural societies, through theory on niche construction, cultural evolution, and the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) (17, 20, 29–33; see the sidebar titled Niche Construction, Cultural Evolution, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis). Land system science integrates disciplines across the natural and social sciences, from remote sensing and ecology to economics, sociology, NICHE CONSTRUCTION, CULTURAL EVOLUTION, AND THE EXTENDED EVOLUTIONARY SYNTHESIS Many species, such as dam-building beavers, nest-building insects, and other ecosystem engineers, alter their environments in ways that change their adaptive fitness and that of others in their environments. The focus is on the history and consequences of land use changes, not their ultimate causes or mechanisms, the integrated evolutionary perspective of the EES will help to characterize the empirical coupling of long-term changes in land use practices, societies, species, and ecosystems [17, 36]
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