Journal
QUATERNARY SCIENCE REVIEWS
Volume 28, Issue 27-28, Pages 3011-3015Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.05.022
Keywords
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Funding
- Atmospheric Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation
- Div Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences
- Directorate For Geosciences [0902982] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The centerpiece of the early anthropogenic hypothesis is the claim that humans took control of greenhouse-gas trends thousands of years ago because of emissions from early agriculture (Ruddiman, 2003, 2007). A common reaction to this claim is that too few people lived thousands of years ago to have had a major effect on either land use or greenhouse-gas concentrations. Implicit in this view is the notion that per-capita land clearance has changed little for millennia, but numerous field studies have shown that early per-capita land use was large and then declined as increasing population density led to more intensive farming. Here we explore the potential impact of changing per-capita land use in recent millennia and conclude that greater clearance by early agriculturalists could have had a disproportionately large impact on CO2 emissions. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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