ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 116 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
116 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 766 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Toward a decolonial One Health: Findings from a participatory action research initiative with indigenous, Campesino, and Afro-descendant communities in the Amazon.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Article
- Edge-Rich Landscapes Promote Genetic Diversity While Arable Land Restricts It: Landscape-Genomic Patterns Across Three Insect Species in an Agriculture-Dominated Grassland Mosaic.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Community biocultural mapping reveals historical occupation and enables defense of African rainforests.Ambio · 2026Article
- Practitioner perceptions of biodiversity criteria for solar suitability analyses in the United States.npj biodiversity · 2026Article
- Europe's land take and the loss of nature and cropland to artificial surfaces.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Sedimentary Metagenomics Reveal Avian Community Transitions From the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Threats to and management of Natura 2000 protected areas relative to agricultural practices.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Millennial land carbon emissions in China offset by carbon sinks of the past four decades.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Plant Invasions in Mountain Areas: Global and Mediterranean Perspectives.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Forest loss intensifies meteorological drought in more than half of Earth's climate zones.Science advances · 2026Article
- Delayed effects of indirect drivers behind changing habitat management in Central Europe.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2026Article
- Destructive by nature? What human-driven extinctions of mammoths and mastodons mean for today's planetary environmental crisis.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- The Global Spatial Co-Variation Between Crop Diversity and Landscape Heterogeneity.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Long-term synchronous changes in body size among domesticated and wild species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Biocultural memory of reciprocity: the Mapuche trafkintu as social-ecological relationships of care and vindication.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2025Article
- Traditional land use is integral to ecological function in SW Madagascar.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Trade-offs between agricultural production and ecosystem services under different land management scenarios in the Loess Plateau of China.Scientific reports · 2025Article
56 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
18 authors at 17 institutions in 9 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Archaeological and paleoecological evidence shows that by 10,000 BCE, all human societies employed varying degrees of ecologically transformative land use practices, including burning, hunting, species propagation, domestication, cultivation, and others that have left long-term legacies across the terrestrial biosphere. Yet, a lingering paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists, and policymakers is that human transformation of terrestrial nature is mostly recent and inherently destructive. Here, we use the most up-to-date, spatially explicit global reconstruction of historical human populations and land use to show that this paradigm is likely wrong. Even 12,000 y ago, nearly three quarters of Earth's land was inhabited and therefore shaped by human societies, including more than 95% of temperate and 90% of tropical woodlands. Lands now characterized as "natural," "intact," and "wild" generally exhibit long histories of use, as do protected areas and Indigenous lands, and current global patterns of vertebrate species richness and key biodiversity areas are more strongly associated with past patterns of land use than with present ones in regional landscapes now characterized as natural. The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.