Re: The ³fire stick farming² hypothesis



Marc Verhaegen wrote:

The ³fire stick farming² hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging
strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics
RB Bird, DW Bird, BF Codding, CH Parker & JH Jones 2008 PNAS 105:14796-801

Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a ³resource
management² strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever
been conducted.

anyone ever think to ask them>? Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary
Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of
anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes
through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity.
Anthropogenic landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages
than landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of scale,
not of kind. Landscape scale is directly linked to foraging for small,
burrowed prey (monitor lizards), which is a specialty of Aboriginal women.
The maintenance of small-scale habitat mosaics increases small-animal
hunting productivity. These results have implications for understanding the
unique biodiversity of the Australian continent, through time and space. In
particular, anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of
paleolandscapes are likely to be spatially localized and linked to less
mobile, ³broad-spectrum² foraging economies.

.

Quantcast