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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Our radical changes to Earth’s greenery began long ago — with farms, not factories

Humanity’s imprint on plant species and abundance began roughly 4,000 years ago, when agriculture took off.
An illustration of farm labourers working in ancient Greece.

A nineteenth-century illustration of a harvest in ancient Greece. Farming intensified around 2000 BC, when the rate of change in Earth’s plant life sped up. Credit: Docutres/Index/Heritage Images/Alamy

Human activity began to transform the number and variety of plant species on Earth thousands of years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution, and might have had an even greater impact on vegetation than did the last ice age.

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Nature 593, 480 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01336-w

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