Résumé
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.