Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

Although scientists are aware that humans share the same biological heritage as do all other organisms on the planet, the reliance of Homo sapiens on culture and cooperation has resulted in what can best be described as ''a spectacular evolutionary anomaly. '' 1:11 The extra-somatic adaptations, technological dominance, and success of our species in colonizing every terrestrial habitat have no parallel.2 Moreover, Homo sapiens accounts for about eight times as much biomass as do all other terrestrial wild vertebrates combined, 3 an amount equivalent to the biomass of all 14,000þ species of ants, 4 the most successful terrestrial invertebrates. Human societies are complex, with more specialized economic niches in the United States than the total number of mammalian species on the planet.5 While some might suggest that only post-industrial humans achieved stunning biological success, data suggest that humans living as hunter-gatherers would have attained a world population of more than 70 million individuals 6 and a total biomass greater than that of any other large vertebrate on the planet if agriculture had not been repeatedly invented as they spread.Identifying the causes of human uniqueness is one of the most exciting and philosophically profound issues of all scientific research. Despite this, only recently have theoretical and empirical advances allowed research to focus directly on human uniqueness. Although cultural and biological views of human behavior have been at odds for at least a halfcentury, recent research on culturegene interaction has begun to converge on a paradigm that integrates not only areas of anthropology, 7,8 but all the biological, social, and behavioral sciences.

This paper proposes a new methodology to study prehistoric lithic assemblages in an attempt to derive from that facet of prehistoric behavior the greater technoeconomic system in which it was embedded. By using volumetric artifact density and the frequency of retouched pieces within a given lithic assemblage, it becomes possible to identify whether these stone tools were created by residentially mobile or logistically organized foragers. The linking factor between assemblage composition and land-use strategy is that of curation within lithic assemblages as an expression of economizing behavior. This method is used to study eight sites from southeastern Italy to detect changes in adaptation during the Late Pleistocene. We compare and contrast Mousterian, Uluzzian, proto-Aurignacian and Epigravettian assemblages, and argue that the first three industries overlap considerably in terms of their technoeconomic flexibility. Epigravettian assemblages, on the other hand, display a different kind of land-use exploitation pattern than those seen in the earlier assemblages, perhaps as a response to deteriorating climatic conditions at the Last Glacial Maximum. While we discuss the implications of these patterns in the context of modern human origins, we argue that the methodology can help identify land-use patterns in other locales and periods.

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The geological record shows that abrupt changes in the Earth system can occur on timescales short enough to challenge the capacity of human societies to adapt to environmental pressures. In many cases, abrupt changes arise from slow changes in one component of the Earth system that eventually pass a critical threshold, or tipping point, after which impacts cascade through coupled climate-ecological-social systems. The chance of detecting abrupt changes and tipping points increases with the length of observations. The geological record provides the only long-term information we have on the conditions and processes that can drive physical, ecological and social systems into new states or organizational structures that may be irreversible within human time frames. Here, we use well-documented abrupt changes of the past 30 kyr to illustrate how their impacts cascade through the Earth system. We review useful indicators of upcoming abrupt changes, or early warning signals, and provide a perspective on the contributions of palaeoclimate science to the understanding of abrupt changes in the Earth system.

During the last few decades, scientific capabilities for understanding and predicting weather and climate risks have advanced rapidly. At the same time, technological advances, such as the Internet, mobile devices, and social media, are transforming how people exchange and interact with information. In this modern information environment, risk communication, interpretation, and decision-making are rapidly evolving processes that intersect across space, time, and society. Instead of a linear or iterative process in which individual members of the public assess and respond to distinct pieces of weather forecast or warning information, this article conceives of weather prediction, communication, and decision-making as an interconnected dynamic system. In this expanded framework, information and uncertainty evolve in conjunction with people’s risk perceptions, vulnerabilities, and decisions as a hazardous weather threat approaches; these processes are intertwined with evolving social interactions in the physical and digital worlds. Along with the framework, the article presents two interdisciplinary research approaches for advancing the understanding of this complex system and the processes within it: analysis of social media streams and computational natural–human system modeling. Examples from ongoing research are used to demonstrate these approaches and illustrate the types of new insights they can reveal. This expanded perspective together with research approaches, such as those introduced, can help researchers and practitioners understand and improve the creation and communication of information in atmospheric science and other fields.