Ancient human societies of the Mediterranean cleared forests and tilled the land for agriculture, dramatically changing vegetation, soils, and even climate across large regions, bringing ‘the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon’. Humans were a destructive force capable of changing Earth permanently for the worse. In 1873, little-known geologist Antonio Stoppani went even further by defining a new time interval based on these changes, the ‘Anthropozoic era’.
