By 3,000 years ago the planet had been “largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists.”

James Gorman, Humans Dominated Earth Earlier Than Previously Thought, NYTimes, August 29, 2019:

Humans substantially altered the planet much earlier than previously thought, a worldwide collection of archaeological experts reported Thursday. By 3,000 years ago, the experts wrote in Science magazine, the planet had been “largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists.”

People farmed, burned forests and grazed their goats, sheep and cattle. By about 1,000 BCE, with Mayan civilization on the rise in Mesoamerica and the Zhou dynasty beginning in China, what the authors describe as intensive agriculture, or continuous cultivation of the land, was “common in most regions where it is still practiced today.”

The results vary for different farming practices and different regions, said Erle Ellis, a geographer and environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, [...] But, he said, it is clear that the information pushes back the onset and spread of major human change to the global environment earlier than previously thought, sometimes by 1,000 years or more. [...]

The report seems to be a first. Archaeologists tend to be local or regional, devoted to particular sites and time periods. “There has never been a real effort to put together an empirical global land-use history,” Dr. Ellis said.