ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Early to mid-Holocene human activity exerted gradual influences on Amazonian forest vegetation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 6 papers.
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6 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interpretable machine learning reveals daytime and nighttime forest fire point drivers in Guizhou.iScience · 2026Article
- Quantifying past forest cover and biomass changes in the Ecuadorian Amazon.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Past Fire and Vegetation Change in the Hyperdiverse Forests of the Ecuadorian Amazon.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Long-term fire and vegetation change in northwestern Amazonia.Biotropica · 2023Article
- Early to mid-Holocene human activity exerted gradual influences on Amazonian forest vegetation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Tropical forests in the deep human past.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans have been present in Amazonia throughout the Holocene, with the earliest archaeological sites dating to 12 000 years ago. The earliest inhabitants began managing landscapes through fire and plant domestication, but the total extent of vegetation modification remains relatively unknown. Here, we compile palaeoecological records from lake sediments containing charcoal and from pollen analyses to understand how human land-use affected vegetation during the early to mid-Holocene, and place our results in the context of previous archaeological work. We identified gradual, rather than abrupt changes in forest openness, disturbance and enrichment, with useful species at almost all sites. Early human occupations occurred in peripheral sites of Amazonia, where natural fires are part of the vegetation dynamics, so human-made fires did not exert a novel form of disturbance. Synchronicity between evidence of the onset of human occupation in lake records and archaeological sites was found for eastern Amazonia. For southwestern and western Amazonia and the Guiana Shield, the timing of the onset of human occupation differed by thousands of years between lake records and archaeological sites. Plant cultivation showed a different spatio-temporal pattern, appearing
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