The paper describes the impact of human activities on the ecosystem prior to the intensification of farming and industrial revolution, using an impressive amount of data gathered from archaeological excavations around the world.

Until now, it was considered that early hunter-gatherer-foraging-fishing groups had little impact on the ecosystem and that the human communities were an inherent part of the landscape. The underestimated thump of prehistoric human groups some thousands of years ago, before the widespread appearance of cities is extremely troublesome. 

This research has important implications on our perception of the interaction between humans and environment.

In a way, the data implies that our species has been disconnected from its ecosystem since the dawn of human communities.

This is the latest in a rather long string of papers that erroneously equates human imprint on Earth's land cover over a range of earlier timeframes, from 7,000 years ago to the Columbian Exchange ca.1610, with the advent of the Anthropocene.

These long-time-scale, diachronous impacts are indeed very interesting in terms of land surface change and terrestrial environmental impacts, but their records are already considered to be part of the Holocene from a stratigraphic perspective. Indeed, these impacts help to differentiate the Holocene from earlier interglacials within the late Quaternary.

However, from an Earth System perspective, these early human impacts did not drive the system out of Holocene conditions, either in terms of the physical climate or the biosphere, as measured, for example, in a mass extinction event.

In contrast, these early human impacts pale into insignificance when compared to the magnitude and rate of the human-driven trajectory of the Earth System as a whole - climate, atmosphere, ocean, ice and biosphere - rapidly away from the Holocene, a globally synchronous trajectory that clearly began in the mid-20th century.

The emerging stratigraphic record, albeit still very short, shows a sharp, globally synchronous boundary for a wide range of markers around the mid-20th century, consistent with the large body of Earth System observations and analyses. The mid-20th century base of the Anthropocene is generally easy and straightforward to define compared to the markers for earlier geologic time intervals.

This is important collaborative research that yields important new insights into the timing and extent of modification of landscapes by humans.

It is particularly exciting as it breaks the traditional mold of archaeological studies being characterised by small data sets, such as from a single excavation, and instead takes a global, deep-time, big data perspective.

The archaeological data of this study makes sense, confirming what we already knew, such as the shift from hunting and gathering to farming and pastoralism. It tells us that intensive human land use occurred much earlier than previously thought.

However, I would be cautious in linking the 'humans’ effect' with the extinction of fauna and flora during the final years of the last ice age.

The ArchaeoGLOBE Project team have compiled an extensive archaeological database of global land use change over the last 10,000 years to show a long term, irreversible trajectory toward increasingly intensive land use, from widespread foraging (hunting, gathering and fishing) at 10,000 years before the present time (BP), to the broad spread of intensive agriculture after 2,000 years BP.

Because foragers may cause substantial environmental change, by altering biotic communities and use of fire, the evidence of extensive foraging at 10,000 years BP indicates that much of the earth was influenced by humans before the domestication of plants and animals.

The data also shows that by 3,000 years ago most of the globe was affected by agriculture or pastoralism.

However, the authors draw a longbow when they go on to state that 10,000 years ago 'most of the terrestrial biosphere (was) influenced extensively by human activities' and that the 'planet (was) largely transformed by 3,000 BP'; the magnitude of the impacts, particularly by foragers, is almost certainly overstated.

Nevertheless, the data does show that anthropogenic environmental change has a long history, so the beginning of the Anthropocene, when humans had a significant impact on Earth's ecosystems, could extend further into the past than the commonly cited beginning of the Agricultural Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the idea that modern industrial activities and the incredible amount of rubbish they produce – plastics, electronics, nuclear waste and much more - is going to create a distinctly visible geological layer in the far distant future.

The big question is when humans really started to change the planet and there’s a huge amount of debate about this. This study gathered information from archaeological sites around the world for the last 10,000 years, the period after the end of the last Ice Age, up to the 1850s.

They compared how people were making a living from the land, whether that was foraging, growing crops, or breeding domesticated animals. It’s the first time we’ve had this kind of big picture of what people were actually doing. And it turns out that the start of irreversible changes to Earth’s environment occurred before 3000 years ago, a lot earlier than previously thought. 

So does this mean we can blame the current global crisis on our ancestors? Well, not really. It does give us a context to assess the rate and extent of environmental change in the present, and a much clearer idea of how human action contributed to that.