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.

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The Middle Holocene was a period in which significant climate change and rapidly increasing population density are often both associated with dramatic changes in human subsistence and social organisation. Methodologically, it is interesting to ask: how can archaeologists learn to distinguish environmentally-and demographicallyconditioned aspects of change in such strategies? Limiting the scope of the study to the Americas partially controls variation in the timing of initial occupation, although both the scale and impact of climate change vary widely. This provides a laboratory for testing expectations of analytical models which allow environmental and demographic variables to change independently. This exploration is founded on Binford's (2001) environmental and hunter-gatherer frames of reference.