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The Aegean hosts some of the earliest cultural centers in European antiquity. To reconstruct the evolution of early anthropogenic impact in this region, we have examined lead Pb contents and vegetation dynamics on well-dated environmental archives extending to the early Holocene.
This first manifestation of marine pollution coincides with maximum deforestation and agricultural expansion, signaling pervasive human impact on ecosystems connected to the advanced monetized societies during the Hellenistic and Roman periods in Ancient Greece.
Connected to the establishment of the first agricultural societies in Eurasia during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene ca. A multitude of proxy records, including pollen 3 , charcoal 4 , and stable-isotope 5 data, as well as modeling of population density and land use change 6 support the notion that anthropogenic impact further intensified during the Bronze Age starting ca. While the earliest impact was confined to the close vicinity of settlements 6 , 8 , a surge in mining activity led to a hemisphere-wide human effect on the environment as evidenced by mining-derived lead Pb in Greenland ice cores from ca.
Despite the manifestation of such supraregional human effects, it has yet remained unclear when early societies started to restructure their environment beyond the close proximity to sociocultural centers. Even more so, the impact of early societies on the marine realm has remained largely unexplored, although there is archeological evidence for human exploitation of nearshore resources already during the Last Glacial ca. Here we investigate the anthropogenic impact on terrestrial and marine environments connected to the socioeconomic evolution of early cultures based on the analysis of sedimentary archives from the Aegean region.
