All 14 articles combine palaeoenvironmental with archaeological data to create new knowledge and thought-provoking conclusions. Six teams concentrated on the reconstruction of past climate and environmental changes; three articles focus on early grain crop dispersal, one on the use of beans, one on the use of aquatic resources, and one on the role of sheep and horse as well as wild plant and animal species in subsistence economies; one author relates long-term coastal changes to cultural development; and one team found proof of intense west-east Eurasian exchange in goods and knowledge in the form of a scale armour made of animal hide, about the time when the globe’s surface was already largely transformed by human impact. The studies employ a wide range of methods, including palynological, malacological and ostracod analyses, sedimentology and geomorphology, sediment geochemical, biomarker and pyrogenic compound analyses, analysis of lipid residues and seed impressions on pottery, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses, and radiocarbon dating as well as systematic synthesis of palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records and Bayesian chronological modelling. Through their work in different parts of northern and eastern Eurasia and the adjacent region to the south, the authors fostered long-standing research cooperation, but also initiated new interdisciplinary and multinational research activities. While the study results advance understanding about the evolution of human and environmental systems and their interrelation and thus contribute to current debates about the Anthropocene, they also set out vast knowledge gaps that remain to be addressed in future research. The historian William James Durant said in 1945 “It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.” (https://www.will-durant.com/invitation.htm, retrieved 5th February 2022). We hope that this special issue will encourage further interdisciplinary research to unravel the deep history of human-environment relations in Eurasia.