Understanding the evolution process and rule of the human-water-ecology is very important for the current and future river basin management and planning. This study briefly reviews the achievement obtained by many scholars for decades on the water environment, human activities and ecological environment and their coupling research in the past two thousand years in the Heihe River Basin, a typical inland river basin in arid region of northwest China, including the changes of the precipitation, temperature and runoff in historical period, the evolution process of the terminal lake, desertification process and oasis succession, social development, such as the changes of the population, alternation of agricultural and animal husbandry production, water allocation, water management. Although a lot of important progress has been made in the individual study and a lot of material and data have been accumulated, there are lack in full description of human-water-ecology co-evolution process and quantitative analysis of their interaction in long time scale at basin scale. In the future we should concentrate on two aspects, one is data mining method for producing a set of long time series reliable data about human, water and ecology by comparing and calibrating the exciting achievements and data; the other is constructing dynamical model for depicting the process of human-water-ecology co-evolution by adding mutual feedback mechanism between human activities and eco-hydrological system. It can light on river basin management in current and future and provide references for other basins both at home and abroad by revealing the human-water-ecology co-evolution process in the Heihe River Basin in the past two thousand years. Now the rise of socio-hydrology will greatly promote the development of the study of the human-water-ecology evolution in a basin.