The “fire stick farming” hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics

Abstract

Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a ''resource management'' strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. 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, ''broad-spectrum'' foraging economies.fire ecology ͉ human behavioral ecology ͉ hunter-gatherers ͉ resource management

Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere

“…Moreover, their biospheric influence was far greater than would be presumed from their population size because their use of tools and social learning revolutionized their success in hunting and gathering [25,27,29]. Palaeolithic humans engineered ecosystems using fire and sometimes other tools to clear vegetation [25,[38][39][40][41], and this, combined with their effective hunting technologies, may have helped cause the extinction of megafauna across most of the terrestrial biosphere [42], with profound ecological consequences resulting from the loss of these keystone species [43]. Nevertheless, Palaeolithic human systems did not transform ecosystems in ways entirely novel to the biosphere; enhanced fire rates and megafaunal extinctions are both common effects of climate variation that can be caused by glacial cycles [41,42].…”

General patterns of niche construction and the management of ‘wild’ plant and animal resources by small-scale pre-industrial societies

“…In the spinifex (Triodia spp.) sandplains and dune fields in western Australia, for example, controlled fires have been shown to result in greater habitat heterogeneity at the spatial scale of the human day range, with the increase in landscape diversity resulting in an increase in small-animal hunting productivity [40].…”

A Cultural Niche Construction Theory of Initial Domestication

“…Resource-catchment analysis of small-scale societies continues to be an active area of inquiry, as a variety of new approaches are being employed (e.g., Bliege-Bird et al 2008). Although the size and shape of human resource-catchment areas are variable across environmental zones, they represent a universal and long-term aspect of how small-scale human societies have successfully adapted to their local ecosystems.…”

“…Over the past half century, many aspects of TEK have been documented for small-scale societies occupying different ecosystems worldwide, from the arctic tundra to tropical forests. Considerable attention has been focused, for example, on the often comprehensive and detailed taxonomies of plants and animals developed by small-scale societies (e.g., Berlin 1992) and the associated knowledge of the life cycles, seasonal availability, and patterns of behavior of the many species that are relied on for survival (e.g., Anderson 2005;Deur and Turner 2005;Berkes 2008;Bliege-Bird et al 2008).…”