Looking to the past to understand the impacts of human land use in South Asia
An international group of scholars, including archaeologists from the School of Arts & Sciences, synthesized archaeological evidence in South Asia from 12,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Whether through agricultural practices, deforestation, or urbanization, how modern humans use land has had an unprecedented impact on the planet. But historical information on human land use is lacking, impacting the quality of the climate models used today. An international group of archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and modelers has been working to address this gap. They make up the Past Global Changes (PAGES) LandCover6K working group, which formed in 2014 to reconstruct human land use and land cover over the past 12,000 years. Read more at Penn Today.