Homo has lived on Earth for several millions of years and has gradually spread outwards from Africa. The geomorphological impact of humans has changed greatly over time in response to their global distribution, numbers, and adoptions of new technologies. At an early stage in their history humans started the use of fire. Early humans also used stone tools, and in producing them undertook quarrying and splitting of rock outcrops and boulders. Another important early human impact was a spasm of animal extinction, often called ‘Pleistocene Overkill’. The spread of domestication and agriculture transformed land cover at a global scale, and the deliberate removal of forest, whether by fire or cutting, is one of the most longstanding and significant ways in which humans have modified the environment. One highly important development in agriculture, because of its rapid and early effects on environment, was irrigation and the adoption of riverine agriculture. The Secondary Products Revolution occurred in the Old World in the Mid-Holocene and saw, for example, the use of animal-drawn ploughs. Although modest communal settlements may have occurred before the adoption of domestication, it was within a few thousand years of the initiation of cereal agriculture, that people began to gather into cities. The mining of ores and the smelting of metals was one further development in human cultural and technological life which was to increase human power. The perfecting of sea-going ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to globalization, while the invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, and of the internal combustion engine and high energy explosives in the late nineteenth century, massively increased human access to energy and lessened dependence on animals, wind and water. The burning of fossil fuels is the major driver of anthropogenic climatic changes and it is since the industrial revolution that the concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane have risen so sharply and inexorably. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution three hundred years ago, a great acceleration in human impacts on geomorphology has occurred.