There is evidence of Aboriginal life, with rock art, 60,000 yrs ago, in Australia. They cleared areas with bush fires.
19
There is the theory that due to hunter gatherers and primitive farmers burning fields we missed the trigger for the next ice age. You can see a sudden warming trend in various proxy measures of climate from the ancient era.
7
I've thought that some staple crops, such as wheat, potatoes, maize, Asian rice and African rice, had been cultivated for much longer than three thousand years. Also, as another commenter observed, humans may have extinguished many large North American herbivores soon after their arrival on this continent, leading to the extinction of the large predators that hunted them. I wonder therefore what is meant by dominance of the planet's ecology. Is the point that these things were not extensive enough? Some clarification would be welcome.
11
@Thomas - This article, and the paper in Science, are about the fact that all of these known early impacts had each, individually, been known about, but that nobody had attempted to see what the aggregate impact was during those past millennia, and how much of the planet we were affecting at any given point.
If you click the link Mr. Gorman provides in the first paragraph, here's the first thing your read, above the abstract:
"Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts). Hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists transformed the face of Earth earlier and to a greater extent than has been widely appreciated, a transformation that was essentially global by 3000 years before the present."
20
The caption under the top picture says "human activity began altering the planet 3,000 years ago."
The second sentence of the story says "By 3,000 years ago, the experts wrote in Science magazine, the planet had been 'largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists.' ”
Which is it?
17
Just a few days ago the 3.5 million year old fossilized skull of a very early human was published in an article by the NYT. The article described a brain cavity that held a small, chimpanzee sized brain and also portrayed a bright-eyed and alert man.
What occurred to me was a biblical phrase; "And god said let there be light".
Now after some reflection I have come to the conclusion that what god said has been mis-translated and greatly misunderstood. God did not say let there be "light". What god really said was "Let there be enlightenment". There was no physical darkness covering the Earth as god had already created the heavens and the Earth. The sun was already in place. But, humans, his greatest creations were in the first stages of evolution and god, in his wisdom, knew that for man to exist in his image, man must have self-awareness and become "enlightened".
So, now that we see that man was populating the Earth in more than one region, we can also see that man was becoming more and more enlightened. That is what enable man to dominate the Earth and "be fruitful and multiply".
Let there be enlightenment. The humans discovered that they could control their environment and pool their knowledge. They also discovered they could work together and form communities. The darkness was indeed lifted from the Earth.
8
Before Columbus, North American natives did not have metal, and did not farm on a large scale. They were more nearly mesolithic than neolithic in culture.
Yet, they had made vast changes to the Eastern Woodlands. Regular organized burning kept the woodlands open, with bigger trees, less brush, path people could run in, and different, larger game animals.
That is Anthropocene too, "the onset and spread of major human change to the global environment."
In the West, Native American communities actively managed North American prairies for centuries before Christopher Columbus.
"mobile hunter-gatherers manipulated the environment by improving the grassland through fire.” and "Anthropologists and historians have documented a wide variety of fire uses by Native peoples in the Americas." https://www.futurity.org/native-americans-fire-bison-hunts/
That too is Anthropocene.
18
3000 years ago? That was yesterday. The cognitive revolution was about 70,000 years ago. At that point humans began altering the planet. By 20,000 years ago humans had driven to extinction over half the large land mammals, 20 foot tall ground sloths, armadillos 10 feet long, etc, etc. 3000 years? That is silly.
47
Here's what I find most interesting:
The HYDE data set, "a major resource for scientists who forecast global change...is a model that projects estimates into the past, much the way climate change models predict future events". But it turns out to be way off once they compared their estimates with the archaeological evidence.
Could it be that the computer models of climate change activist/scientists will turn out to be equally off the mark?
3
@laurence: Hold that thought, and let us know in 3000 years.
12
My reading posits that the 'agricultural revolution' started between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, when homo sapiens began the shift from hunter-gatherer bands to larger groups that remained tied to the locations where their seeds sprouted. Thus began the idea of real estate ("this is our land, our crop, and we have to defend it from the others"), permanent settlements, specialization of roles, etc. It's not surprising to confirm that this trend continued to develop up through 3,000 years ago (yawn).
13
To me when is not as important as why. I realize, for incipient agriculture, that why may be to optimize energy expenditure to get the most reward out of the least work. But, the threads of the relations of power that necessitated, forced, or effected a transition from hunting/gathering to incipient agriculture, to me at least, are more crucial to try to unravel, if that’s even possible. Why? Because those relations of power are what still run modern society as we know it, and are the instruments that oppress individuals, and their collective ensembles.
12
Most of the comments I'm seeing here seem a bit angry. Some folks are aggressively defending the proposition that human beings have only become dominant recently, and that 3,000 years ago our impacts were "only local." I've seen that exact phrase in probably half of these comments -- "only local."
What am I missing? Is there some internet fandom that imagines humans in the middle ages lived in harmony with nature, and golden haired princesses really did have talking animal friends? What is the source of this defensive reaction? What sacred cow are these scientists attacking that is provoking such a strong defensive reaction?
The only thing I can think of is that some people are afraid that looking at environmental impacts of human activity in the ancient world is some sort of attempt to minimize the impacts of human activity today. Is that it? No one has actually said that, but it's the only rationale I can think of. If that's what you're worried about, you can stop worrying. Research like this is aimed at better understanding human impact on our planet, and can only help us as we try to navigate the challenges our planet faces today. I think people have become so political now, that people can no longer just look at a report like this without searching for a hidden agenda.
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@Revelwoodie - well put. The responses have me kind of confused, too. It's like Mr. Gorman and the authors of the paper have insulted everyone's great-great-great*400- grandmother. And everyone seems dead certain (without, it seems, reading the paper) that changes were tiny.
Maybe they've gained an uncomfortable sense that actaions add up, so they fire off a snippy response before driving to the store for a bag of chips.
10
@Revelwoodie - o internet conspiracies, merely facts, science, and common sense:
Ancient human civilizations, compared to current human civilization, were vastly less impactful in terms of population, geographic distribution, technology and impact on global systems.
This story is outrageously misleading and irresponsible. It is no accident that many readers know that and comment accordingly.
8
Poor title writing. A roundup of far flung studies doesn't represent global domination without showing resultant global consequences. In fact we need to look carefully to see how much these various small human interventions dominated/damaged, and/or synergized/enriched local ecosystems. To project backwards 5,000 years from the modern high correlation between human hyperdominance and ecological destruction is inappropriate. Most indigenous hunter/gatherer and gardening societies appear to have operated in biosynergy within their ecological niches. Their ecosocial vaues and behavior patterns, if expanded from within into more elaborate farming could still remain environmentally "healthy." I've seen evidence to support the hypothesis that human destructive dominance starts and grows when hunters/gatherers begin to trade their foodstuffs with outsiders for "profit," thus creating dichotomous dominant/dependent inter-community relationships. And that seems to be grounds for careless over-expansion as well as harmful hierarchical oppression. Food for thought!
7
@Anthony Rose I think you're injecting value judgments into this report that aren't there. None of what I've read here is suggesting that ancient farmers and/or hunter/gatherers were "destructive," or that their practices were not "environmentally healthy." I'm sure many individual communities may have been destructive to their environments and many others were not. But that's not what this report is about. It's about when that activity became dominant.
12
@Revelwoodie -- My primary disagreement is with the idea that organized data about scattered human societies converting wildlands to gardens and farms indicates 'HUMANS DOMINATED EARTH." That is way too broad a generalization. Title writers are not the article writers and they tend to inflate the findings to attract readers. I agree with you that it is not clear from this report that the societies in the collective review destroyed anything (beyond the forests or savannahs they cultivated)... nor is it clear that they Dominated the broader ecosystems in which they lived; they may have just cleared some forest or tilled soil sustainably. There is broad evidence that humans have lived in mutual synergy within diverse natural landscapes. Sustainable development principles today promote give-&-take mutuality between humanity and nature. It is important for us to know when, how, and where such mutuality emerged and evolved. In my six decades of research & development in diverse organizations and ecosystems worldwide, the destructive affects of domination have been obvious and vast, while mutual cooperation and sustained biosynergy offer some hope for recovery of the biosphere
1
I too found this article difficult to understand as it relates to the meager 3000 years. But if I may, I believe what this writer is saying about the study is that they are only beginning to be able to predict backwards better than they once had.
"That is a common problem, Dr. Ellis said. “We should be able to know the past much better than we know the future but really we don’t,” he said."
And further along:
"The new paper is an attempt to remedy the situation."
5
This is not new information. A number of papers have been published on this topic, including the seminal paper by William F. Ruddiman in 2003: https://www.chriscrews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Ruddiman2003.pdf
My understanding is that CO2 and CH4 increased as a function of population due to clearing of forested areas for agriculture and husbandry respectively, the result of which was a steady increase in GHG concentrations over the past 8,000 years. While the pre-industrial rates of GHG emissions are dwarfed by industrial-era rates, the total anthropogenic contribution of GHGs (i.e. the integral of the GHG emission rate) in the pre-industrial era is much larger than in the industrial era. In the paper, Ruddiman estimates pre-industrial emissions resulted in a 0.8 to 2.0 C increase in atmospheric temperatures. Granted, these estimates were made with many assumptions.
8
@DMOLMEN -- Anthropocene, the human impact on and change of the environment, is not limited to CO2 emissions and levels.
12
@Mark Thomason I've been struggling to figure out why there is such strong push back in the comments against this report, and I think you may have found the reason. People are reading this as if it were a report about climate, and after hearing all those denialists shouting, "Climate has always been changing!" for the last 20 years, it's understandable that someone who didn't read this article carefully or who isn't familiar with the concept of the 'anthropocene age' might read this as more of the same. It's a shame, because that's not at all what this report is saying. It's not even what this report is about.
11
That’s OK,Not to be concerned when things/methods were created, just so we could have an easier life: just so the final day zero remains the same — the day we’re all gonna disappear off the earth, gasping for air or comfort in the blinding blistering heat (Except those with humongous air-conditioning units). And hopefully I’m gone just before that
From the way things are going, when the history of life on earth is written humans will be included as the cancer that killed it. Or as a famous philosopher once said, (click on) https://lucasmuseum.org/works/detail/asset_id/901
9
Um, "further than earth scientist currently recognize"? Might want to look at earth scientist Bill Ruddiman's work over the last ~20 years arguing for significant human impacts going back at least 5000 years. As all too often is the case, promotion of research as new or novel tends to overstate how new or novel it really is.
17
A small tribe of primitive humans, setting fires, cutting trees, damming a stream -- these are local environmental effects, a far cry from "dominating" the planet! Elephants are the dominant species in their sphere of influence, but their global effect is minimal. Once humans, with our technology, spread over the entire planet, we became the dominant world species. And only in the past four-five hundred years have we been able to collectively affect all life on the planet.
This report is based not on new research or archaeology, but on a new survey of other research. This is happening more and more, as research budgets are slashed, and travel to historical sites is more dangerous.
I can't say I learned much of value from this piece.
7
@Miss Dovey - Perhaps you would have gotten more out of the piece if you paid attention to the number of times they mentioned that effects were worldwide, not just local.
Since intensive agriculture is practiced almost everywhere but under ice caps today, it's a big deal when they say that 3,000 years ago "intensive agriculture, or continuous cultivation of the land, was “common in most regions where it is still practiced today.”"
So what they're trying to tell you is that your "small tribe of primitive humans" multiplied across the world tends to add up.
Sorry that some archaeologists had the nerve to combine lots of local data into one place so they could view it in breadth, but that's part of science, too. You know, so they could avoid the effect told in that story about the blind men trying to describe the elephant? The local descriptions didn't capture the whole.
19
@Miss Dovey That's the whole point of the report, that these activities passed the point of "local environmental effects" much longer ago than previously thought. I think maybe the thousands of years between your opinion of when human dominance began and the conclusions of these scientists may simply boil down to the definition of the word "dominate." Which is a worthwhile conversation to have, of course. But it doesn't really get at the findings of the report.
10
In a world where "fake news" is universal, science speaks to us all about the real issues. Thanks god !
3
Imagine that -- making such comprehensive changes a mere 2000 years after the earth was created... ;-)
16
And we’re much more mobile thanks to dinosaurs...
5
In the Jewish religion it is year 5779, which makes it older than 3000 years. I would imagine the Jews were farmers and animal keepers, as in sheep, goats and cattle. So they must have been farming long before 3000 years ago.
6
Stan B, Jewish culture and religion began between 3000 to 4000 years ago. The number 5780 (coming up shortly) is the result of some "scholar" reviewing the "begats" in the Hebrew Bible and trying to calculate when "in the beginning" actually began. Apparently he never took a course in cosmology, geology or archeology.
10
Judaism extends back only to 1,000 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Judaism
The 5779 date is mythological.
Farming in the Levant goes back to 9500 BC.
9
I guess it all depends on what we mean by "dominating the earth." When we spread out across the continents, we killed off numerous large mammals. How they could/would have evolved along side of us (like what occurred somewhat in Africa) and affected the landscape (but for our hunting them to extinction) is a change in the planet's biosphere that should be taken into account. Our domination occurred much earlier than 3,000 years.
12
There is a very good book recently written by James Scott; "Against the Grain". There he argues that for 4000 years homo sapiens lived in settlements before the rise of "civilizations" and the development of "States". These were "primitive" communal societies. In fact, state based societies did not dominate the planet until 400 years ago when they became ubiquitous. States were formed to exploit and control labor. Beginning with slavery. So our form of life is really very new to our species.
2
@Oliver
Did you ever hear of something called the Peloponesian Wars? Athens, Sparta, and others? The Persian Empire? China?
Heloooow!
9
Exploiting and controlling labor has been going on for thousands of years. Slavery too.
7
I question that humans dominate the earth. I agree we have a massive impact on the earth but we inflate our stature through the use of "dominate." Biomass would be another way to look at domination, and humans are only 1/10,000 of terrestrial biomass (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/) with that of ants being approximately equal to that of humans.
3
I’m confused. What constitutes agri/land Dominance? When did scientists previously think that occurred (a quote in the article suggests a few hundred years ago but isn’t really clear). I was taught in college that humans had developed agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia by 3-4K BC, which seems consistent with this new data so how is the data providing new info?
I wonder if the editor cut important content the writer provided before the article was published.
11
Can the global practice of burning land for crops (or, earlier, to drive game) be tied to known climate variations? I mean, certain periods were warm golden ages: did they follow the dump of massive CO2 into the atmosphere, and fade as the carbon was removed?
@Robert David South
There is some debate among scientists about how early man's activity began to effect that atmosphere. Some indeed have argued is was as earlier the beginning of farming some 9000 or so years ago.
However, we have various ways to measure how CO2 has changed in the atmosphere over time and only in the last 150 years or so have we dumped "massive CO2 into the atmosphere."
A scientist
7
It was my understanding that much of this started 10,000 to 12,000 years ago with the northward retreat of the glaciers from our last glaciation. And I think that everyone learned in history classes about the civilizations in Mesopotamia and in Egypt that were much older than 3000 years ago. Surely these began to transform the planet. Am I missing something?
51
@JerryV I'm seeing a lot of comments like these, so perhaps the article wasn't clear enough on this point. They're not talking about when humans began practices that altered natural ecosystems, they're talking about when those human practices actually became widespread and prevalent enough to actually become the dominate force in ecosystems. In other words, people may have begun farming and building cities many thousands of years ago, but this paper is estimating that it wasn't until about 3,000 years ago that those activities became globally dominant.
28
@Revelwoodie, Thank you. I think I understand the concept. But when one talks about climatology, we don't normally talk about such things as a global climatology. There are regional climatologies and microclimates. And these change with time (as is now happening). So, this domination and alteration by humans began at local sites and expanded even beyond sites where humans had sizable populations. Where we once had mile thick glaciers, we now have melting permafrost due to global warming. It's hard though to put a date on when these changes reached the point at which they began to alter the planet.
6
@JerryV I think it's important to remember that this report is not only about climate impacts. It's about human impact on natural systems in general. If, for example, the population of large grazers was impacted at a global level by human hunting and/or land use, that's an example of human dominance. Even if we were still millennia away from the kinds of impacts on climate and ecosystems that we see today.
As far as the use of the word "global" is concerned, I believe they are using that in the sense that scientists use the term to define the beginning of the anthropocene age. That's what this report is saying, essentially, that what we call the "anthropocene age" began earlier than we thought, according to how we define the term. It sounds like you may disagree on how that term out to be defined. Which is a legitimate point of debate.
6
"Dominate" is a strong word but 'humans' substantially altered landscapes through the use of fire, even before agriculture appeared. This has been established palaeontologically from Australia where fire frequency -set by nomadic groups - markedly increased and significantly altered plants, animals and the landscape.
3,000 BPE covers the transition from the Bronze to the Iron age and adds effective tools to fire, as a further impact on the landscape. Among other things working iron required converting a lot of timber to charcoal for use in forging and smelting.
The key point of debate here seems to be the definition of "substantially".
20
From an archaeological perspective, 3000 years ago is yesterday. This study doesn't surprise me at all. It's just a beginning to understand how our species has developed on our planet - and where we go from here.
8
The facts presented here do NOT support the language contained in the headline. Yes mankind began to usurp land for production of staples , and when settled geographically could grow culture and invent an economy and tinker with inventions which increased his power to dominate the land. These effects were local only and with low population density do not reach the threshold for using the term 'dominate'. When they started to burn coal and refine metals into swords and plowshares the dominance began.
20
@Alan I'm not sure how to respond meaningfully, because your point isn't entirely clear. I'm confused, for instance, when you refer to a time in history when people "started to burn coal and refine metals into swords." It sounds like you're conflating the bronze age and the industrial revolution? Perhaps I'm just misreading you.
As far as dismissing the human activity discussed in this report as "only local," that's the whole point of the report -- when these things were no longer merely "only local" in the sense that their combined effect rose to the level of global impact. If you disagree with their conclusions, that's fine, but I'm not really understanding your alternate hypothesis, if you have one.
8
Charles Mann has done a good job with his books "1491" and "1493" of trying to raise awareness of the extent of change and to bring to popular attention work that is mostly known to specialists. Granted, his focus is on the Americas and the interaction with Europe in particular, not the entire globe.
We can find common sense thinking ignored in the dogma of disciplines. For example, I've heard about the corridor between glaciers for decades, as the route that the first arrivals in North America used in coming from Asia. Always seemed highly improbable. What does make great sense, is that people used small boats to travel the coastline, staying in sites that are now under hundreds of feet of water.
4
@Svante Aarhenius, Exactly. To some degree this was possible because more of the earth's water was tied up in glaciers. Something similar happened in migration of Homo sapiens from Africa. Aside from people of African descent, we are all descended from small groups of people who left Africa about 70,000 years ago. At this time the Sahara was largely impassable because it was a desert. But it was possible to move the relatively short distance over the Red Sea from what is now Ethiopia to what is now Yemen (look at it on a map). At that time, the sea was also relatively low, so it was possible to move across the Red Sea by island hopping in small boats.
4
personally..I think 3000 years ago is a very conservative underestimate. it may be the point where things started to tip.but my guess is..that to get us to that point 3000 years ago..the influence of humans had to start 10,000, maybe 15,000 - 50,000 years ago.. when relative small bands of humans started their small scale changes. Look at the ruins in Turkey which are close to 25,000 years old..
but.I'm not anthro-archaeologist... just a casual observer of things...great and small
27
Agreed. Doesn't it depend on how one defines "substantially" and "intensive"
Early wheat was domesticated way before three thousand years ago (emmer?)
10
yeah, from what i have read the last year, once we graduated from being hunter-gatherers, it was a bad day for every species, maybe even us.
13