Humans Have Had a More Powerful Effect on the Plant World Than the Last Ice Age

Several thousand years before power generators and vehicles first burned carbon-based minerals into heat-trapping gas, humanity had already started to transform life on the planet—and not subtly.

Newly assembled fossil records from around the world dating back 18,000 years show that plant species began to shift 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and that those shifts have been accelerating ever since. While the work stops short of formally attributing the variations to humanity—there’s a high technical bar for that—there is a “reasonable working inference” that human-driven change “now resembles or exceeds in rate and scope even the profound ecosystem transitions associated with the end of the last glacial period.”