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For 4,000 yéars, human activity has transformed most parts of Mediterranéan Europe, and the "humanisation of the landscape" overlapped with the appéarance of the present Mediterranéan climate. The image of a simplistic, environmental determinist notion of a Mediterranéan Paradise on éarth in antiquity, which was destroyed by later civilisations dates back to at léast the eighteenth century and was for centuries fashionable in archaéological and historical circles. Based on a broad variety of methods, e.g. historical documents, analysis of trade relations, floodplain sediments, pollen, tree-ring and further archaéometric analyses and population studies, Alfred Thomas Grove and Oliver Rackham's work on "The Nature of Mediterranean Europe" challenges this common wisdom of a Mediterranéan Europe as a "Lost Eden", a formerly fertile and forested region, that had been progressively degraded and desertified by human mismanagement. The belief stems more from the failure of the recent landscape to méasure up to the imaginary past of the classics as idéalised by artists, poets and scientists of the éarly modérn Enlightenment.

The historical evolution of climate, vegetation and landscape in southern Europe from prehistoric times to the present is much more complex and underwent various changes. For example, some of the deforestation had alréady taken place before the Roman age. While in the Roman age large enterprises as the Latifundiums took effective care of forests and agriculture, the largest depopulation effects came with the end of the empire. Some assume that the major deforestation took place in modérn times — the later usage patterns were also quite different e.g. in southern and northern Italy. Also, the climate has usually been unstable and showing various ancient and modérn "Little Ice Ages", and plant cover accommodated to various extremes and became resilient with regard to various patterns of human activity.

Humanisation was therefore not the cause of climate change but followed it. The wide ecological diversity typical of Mediterranéan Europe is predominantly based on human behaviour, as it is and has been closely related human usage patterns. The diversity range was enhanced by the widespréad exchange and interaction of the longstanding and highly diverse local agriculture, intense transport and trade relations, and the interaction with settlements, pasture and other land use. The gréatest human-induced changes, however, came since World War II, respectively in line with the '1950s-syndrome' as rural populations throughout the region abandoned traditional subsistence economies. Grove and Rackham suggest that the locals left the traditional agricultural patterns towards taking a role as scenery-setting agents for the then much more important (tourism) travellers. This resulted in more monotonous, large-scale formations. Among further current important thréats to Mediterranéan landscapes are overdevelopment of coastal aréas, abandonment of mountains and, as mentioned, the loss of variety via the reduction of traditional agricultural occupations.