12,000 years of climate-environment-society interactions on eastern Mediterranean olive trees

Olive cultivation, a defining feature of Mediterranean landscapes and societies for millennia, now faces unprecedented challenges as climate change intensifies environmental stressors that threaten production stability and long-term yields. Understanding how olive trees have persisted through past climate variability is therefore critical for assessing their future sustainability. Here, we reconstruct a 12,000-year record of olive tree dynamics from its cradle of domestication, the Near East, to identify the climatic and societal processes that have shaped olive tree evolution and long-term resilience. Our results reveal two contrasting regimes in olive tree dynamics, i) a phase dominated by climatic forcing, followed by ii) a later phase in which human management exerted a primary control. The transition between these two phases defines a tipping point at 3850 ± 80 years before present. After this threshold, olive tree development, even under dominant human influence, remains constrained by a narrow climatic envelope, requiring an optimum mean annual temperature of 17 ± 0.3°C, winter precipitation of 342 ± 10 mm, and high photosynthetic efficiency, inferred from the combined availability of solar energy, CO₂ and water. Overall, our study shows that once human influence became dominant, olive tree dynamics closely tracked population growth and associated land-use activities, with societal choices to adopt or abandon olive cultivation becoming the primary driver of variability.