A synthetic history of human land use: Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts). Hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists transformed the face of Earth earlier and to a greater extent than has been widely appreciated, a transformation that was essentially global by 3000 years before the present. Science , this issue p. 897 ; see also p. 865

This paper presents results of geophysical survey at Zincirli Höyük, a 40-hectare site in southern Turkey dating to the early first millennium bc. The site’s lower town offers ideal circumstances for magnetic gradiometry, and survey results from this area, combined with the results of excavations from the 1890s on the central high citadel, now reveal a nearly complete plan of the ancient city. The results therefore present a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between the production of urban space and the social and historical forces that drove it. Our evidence from Zincirli strongly suggests a pattern of distributed authority in creating the built environment of the city, whereby the king and his administrators planned and constructed the circular walls, streets, and citadel, but according to which individual elite households were probably left to plan and build their own residential compounds. The spatial relationships of these features raise important questions regarding social organization at Iron Age Zincirli. The results also offer a model for understanding the unique spatiality of new cities that were founded throughout Syria and Anatolia during the early first millennium and highlight the relationship of Zincirli to these and other planned cities of the ancient Near East.