3,000 Years of Abusing Earth on a Global Scale

Wherever you go on this blue, green and white globe of ours, odds are some person has been there before you--and left a mark . That's because the hunting, farming or burning practices of our most distant ancestors have shaped most land areas on the planet , argues an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and ecologists in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If we are indeed living in the Anthropocene --a new geologic era brought on by the outsized environmental effects of the human species--then this new epoch isn't just a few hundred years old. The Anthropocene is older than the Industrial Revolution. [More]