Had some wattle seed and cassava pancakes for lunch today.
using their relation with fire in a NEW way to intentional extract resources....
A rare example of an explicit BMTC (behaviourally mediated trophic cascades) in the Late Pleistocene of Africa
derives from northern Malawi, where both paleoenvironmental and
archeological data are available from the same region.
However, ca. 85 ka, during a wet period following the
last prolonged arid period, the long-term relationship between climate
and vegetation was decoupled. Lake levels remained high for the last
85 kyr but species richness never recovered, and instead remained at
low values previously associated with the driest intervals of the last
600 kyr. All four previous low points were associated with a severe
arid period, whereas the Late Pleistocene collapse occurred in concert
with consistently high rainfall conditions. By ca. 85 ka, vegetation
composition also changed to a previously unobserved state, in which
montane forest taxa were largely replaced by grasses and fire-tolerant
trees and shrubs.
Unlike their Middle Pleistocene counterparts, however,
these humans used burning to halt the typical cycle of forest
recolonization by producing large quantities of ignitions that were
outside the normal seasonality of lightning strikes.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/evan.21877 This catalyzed a BMTC, and
extended to the landscape itself, where erosion regimes were altered
by a novel combination of high precipitation and low forest cover. It
was at this time, in the Late Pleistocene, that regional alluvial fans
began to activate and entrain the first direct archeological evidence of
human presence (Figure 3). A tipping point had been reached, and a
new vegetation and burning regime was established by ca. 72 ka.
However, there is evidence that at some point near the Middle-Late Pleistocene boundary humans under-went a threshold-crossing shift in their behavior that is detectably
different from what came before. The sustained, transformative
effects of these behaviors on sculpting ecosystem functions extend
deep into the human past and the evolution of these systems are
inextricably bound to the evolution of our species itself.
99 The end result has been a ratcheting up in both cultural complexity
100 and environmental changes 101 to accommodate new ecological realities.
campuspress.yale.edu/jcthompson/ theconversation.com/early-humans-used-fire-to-permanently-change-the-landscape-tens-of-thousands-of-years-ago-in-stone-age-africa-158574 Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: the role of fire in the broad spectrum revolution
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.21482 especially the use of landscape fire, could be fundamentally entangled with many broad-spectrum revolutions associated with intensified foraging systems.
The immediate function of Martu
burning operates at the scale of the
patch and is designed to clear off
large stands of hummock grass (spi-
nifex, Triodia spp.) in order to
increase the efficiency of searching
for and tracking small animals, primarily burrowed ones