Originally Posted: July 26, 2018
Native American communities actively managed North American prairies for centuries before Christopher Columbus and his ilk arrived in the New World, according to a new study.
Fire was an important indigenous tool for shaping North American ecosystems, but the relative importance of indigenous burning versus climate on fire patterns remains controversial in scientific communities, researchers say.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that, contrary to popular thinking, burning by indigenous hunters combined with climate variability to amplify the effects of climate on prairie fire patterns.
Human dimension
“The important contribution of this research to paleoenvironmental science is a demonstration of the impact that relatively small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers could have on amplifying the broader climatic effect on wildfires,” says coauthor María Nieves Zedeño, a professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
“We have added a new human dimension to the discussion of interactions between people and climate by actually going back in time and showing how mobile hunter-gatherers manipulated the environment by improving the grassland through fire.”
The relative importance of climate and human activities in shaping fire patterns is often debated and has implications for how we approach fire management today, researchers say.
“While there is little doubt that climate plays an important top-down role in shaping fire patterns, it is far less clear whether human activities—including active burning—can override those climate influences,” says lead author Christopher Roos, an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University.
“Too often, if scientists see strong correlations between fire activity and climate, the role of humans is discounted.” READ MORE