ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 148 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
148 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
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- Climate-Driven Range Shifts Limit the Role of Non-Native Trees for Adaptation Processes of European Forests.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- BIOWATCH: a R shiny application for the detection of species of interest in metabarcoding datasets.BMC bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Specialised and persistent raw material procurement by humans in the Middle Pleistocene.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Community Assembly Reveals How Environmental Controls Over Rodent Competition Drive Deer Mouse Density and Hantavirus Infection.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Destructive by nature? What human-driven extinctions of mammoths and mastodons mean for today's planetary environmental crisis.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- What do we know about treelines of the Anthropocene in High Asia?Plant diversity · 2025Review
- Faunal persistence and ecological flexibility in Pleistocene Southeast Asia revealed through multi-isotope analysis.Science advances · 2025Article
- Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Negotiating cohabitation in a Nigerian abattoir: One Health perspectives of human-animal-ecosystem interactions examined in the light of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.One health outlook · 2025Article
- Ancient environmental DNA indicates limited human impact on marine biodiversity in pre-industrial Iceland.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The precision land knowledge of the past enables tailor-made environment therapy and empathy for nature.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Simulating the efficacy of wolf-dog hybridization management with individual-based modeling.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Environment-mediated interactions cause an externalized and collective memory in bacteria.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Early to Mid-Holocene land use transitions in South Asia: A new archaeological synthesis of potential human impacts.PloS one · 2025Article
- Not evolved to save the planet, yet capable to promote pro-environmental action leveraging human nature.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- More on mobility and sedentism: Changes in adaptation from Upper Paleolithic to Incipient Jomon, Tanegashima Island, southern Japan.PloS one · 2025Article
- Disparate and parallel craniofacial climatic adaptations in native populations of Asia, North America, and South America.Journal of anatomy · 2024Article
88 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
The exhibition of increasingly intensive and complex niche construction behaviors through time is a key feature of human evolution, culminating in the advanced capacity for ecosystem engineering exhibited by Homo sapiens A crucial outcome of such behaviors has been the dramatic reshaping of the global biosphere, a transformation whose early origins are increasingly apparent from cumulative archaeological and paleoecological datasets. Such data suggest that, by the Late Pleistocene, humans had begun to engage in activities that have led to alterations in the distributions of a vast array of species across most, if not all, taxonomic groups. Changes to biodiversity have included extinctions, extirpations, and shifts in species composition, diversity, and community structure. We outline key examples of these changes, highlighting findings from the study of new datasets, like ancient DNA (aDNA), stable isotopes, and microfossils, as well as the application of new statistical and computational methods to datasets that have accumulated significantly in recent decades. We focus on four major phases that witnessed broad anthropogenic alterations to biodiversity-the Late Pleistocene global human expansion, the Neolithic spread of agriculture, the era of island colonization, and the emergence of early urbanized societies and commercial networks. Archaeological evidence documents millennia of anthropogenic transformations that have created novel ecosystems around the world. This record has implications for ecological and evolutionary research, conservation strategies, and the maintenance of ecosystem services, pointing to a significant need for broader cross-disciplinary engagement between archaeology and the biological and environmental sciences.
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