Editing Sclerophyll (section)

===Land use===
While the winter rain areas of America, South Africa and Australia, with an unusually large variety of food [[crop]]s, were ideal gathering areas for [[hunter-gatherer]]s until [[European colonization]], agriculture and [[cattle breeding]] spread in the Mediterranean area since the [[Neolithic]], which permanently changed the face of the landscape. In the sclerophyll regions near the coast, permanent crops such as olive and wine cultivation established themselves; However, the landscape forms that characterize the degenerate shrubbery and shrub heaths [[Maquis shrubland|maquis]] and [[garrigue]] are predominantly a result of [[grazing]] (especially with goats).

In the course of the last millennia, the original vegetation in almost all areas of this vegetation zone has been greatly changed by the influence of humans. Where the plants have not been replaced by [[vineyard]]s and olive [[grove (nature)|grove]]s, the [[maquis shrubland|maquis]] was the predominant form of vegetation on the Mediterranean. The maquis has been degraded in many places to the low shrub heather, the garrigue. Many plant species that are rich in aromatic oils belong to both vegetation societies. The diversity of the original sclerophyll vegetation in the world is high to extremely high (3,000–5,000 species per hectare).<ref>Klaus Müller-Hohenstein: The geo-ecological zones of the Earth. In: ''Geography and School''. Issue 59, Bayreuth 1989.</ref>