River Systems and the Anthropocene: A Late Pleistocene and Holocene Timeline for Human Influence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rivers are central to debate about the Anthropocene because many human activities from antiquity focused on channels and floodplains. A literature compilation for the onset of human modification of rivers identifies six stages that represent key innovations focused in the Near East and adjoining areas: (1) minimal effects before about 15,000 cal yr BP, with the use of fire and gathering of plants and aquatic resources; (2) minor effects from increased cultivation after about 15,000 cal yr BP, with plant and animal domestication after about 10,700 cal yr BP; (3) agricultural era after about 9800 cal yr BP, with legacy sediments, widespread fire use, the first dams and irrigation, and mud-brick manufacture; (4) irrigation era from about 6500 cal yr BP, with large-scale irrigation, major cities, the first large dam, urban water supplies, expanded groundwater use, river fleets, and alluvial mining; (5) engineering era with embankments, dams, and watermills after about 3000 cal yr BP, especially in the Chinese and Roman empires; and (6) technological era after about 1800 CE. Anthropogenic river effects were more varied and intense than commonly has been recognised, and they should be considered routinely in interpreting Late Pleistocene and Holocene fluvial archives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".