Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but only in the last 3,000 have we made a marked impact on the earth's environment, a new study has found.
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Using detailed environmental mapping and expert knowledge, an international team of researchers identified the period in human history when agriculture and pastoralism began to transform the earth's environment.
The study, after assessing land use from 10,000 years ago to 1850, concluded that humans were considerably impacting the earth's environment only from 3,000 years ago, much earlier than commonly understood.
"Eight thousand to ten thousand years ago agriculture was probably a local or regional phenomenon, but by about 3,000 years ago it was considerably impacting the earth's land surface," co-author of the study Associate Professor Tim Denham from Australian National University said.
One example of the degradation of the environment by humans over generations is the growth of cities where people cleared surrounding forests for agriculture, said Assoc. Prof Denham.
"Look at London, it has 2,000 years of history, that has been a long term transformation in terms of urbanisation, but the hinterland around it has also been changed to feed the people who live there," he said.
The study shows the human geological age, known as the Anthropocene, hasn't just come as a result of the recent historical periods like the Industrial Revolution, but rather as steps in line with technological progression, said Assoc. Prof. Denham.
"Although the industrial revolution represents a huge step-change in terms of human-caused climate and environmental change, large-scale deforestation and drainage of wetlands had already transformed the earth quite dramatically thousands of years earlier," he said.
Despite our long history of environmental degradation, Assoc. Prof. Denham said humans are getting worse at managing their environment.
"There are more people than there ever have been and the expectations of those people have increased, so it's getting cumulatively worse for the environment," he said.
With the burning of rainforests in the Amazon and parts of central Africa the study shows humans have a long history of putting their "own advancement ahead of the environment's long-term well-being," Assoc. Prof. Denham said
The results of the study are published in the journal Science.
Australian Associated Press
