Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
appropriate. For example, frequent burning of fynbos enhanced availability of
geophytes on which early inhabitants depended (Le Maitre & Brown
1992
). In the
Mediterranean Basin fire has been utilized for converting woody vegetation to
herbaceous crops and rangeland, which intensified during the Holocene (Thirgood
1981
; Blondel
2006
).
Humans reached Australia more than 45 000 yrs BP, and some contend this was
an accidental discovery from people on rafts caught in storms, because the
continent would not have been visible from the next nearest land mass, New
Guinea. Bowman (
2003
), however, suggested that fire may have played a role
informing early peoples of a distant land mass since large smoke plumes from
bushfires in northern Australia would have been visible from New Guinea. Late
Pleistocene human colonization of North America also may have depended on fire
while crossing the Bering Strait in order to survive the arctic conditions (Higuera
et al.
2008
). Aboriginal people in Australia and Native Americans in California
and Chile are thought to have used fire regularly to facilitate resource acquisition
(Pyne
1995
; Anderson & Moratto
1996
), in part because of very limited develop-
ment of agriculture by the earliest inhabitants of these and other MTC regions
(Diamond
1997
). This type of resource acquisition has been described as “fire-
stick” cultivation (Pyne
1995
).
There is a tendency to view these original peoples as more in touch with their
environments and sensitive to the proper use of fire in managing for sustainable
landscapes: the “ecological Indian” model (Krech
1999
). This model has been
invoked to inform fire management as to appropriate management practices for
maintaining biodiversity and natural ecosystem functioning (e.g. Pyne
2000
;
Abbott
2003
). An alternative view is that early peoples used fire to maximize their
fitness much like contemporary societies' impact on the environment was deter-
mined by the balance between resource availability and population density.
There is some commonality in human responses to their environments in widely
disjunct MTC regions. Various modern human behaviors such as symbolic and
technological complexity increased at the about the same time in the Holocene in
both the Mediterranean Basin and South Africa, and it is hypothesized that they
were the result of similar demographic factors that impacted lifestyles (Powell
et al.
2009
). The types of impacts that Holocene populations had on the environment
involved resource exploitation, and sometimes the use of burning resulted in type-
conversion of shrublands and woodlands to grasslands and other herbaceous-
dominated associations. Landscape features played a role in determining impacts.
For example, in California, remote areas in rugged terrain were left untouched
whereas vegetation patterns in other parts of the landscape were transformed
through repeated burning (Keeley
2002b
). In the Cape region of South Africa
geology played a role in that early pastoral peoples found fynbos on low-fertility
soils to be of little grazing value, but on better soils did extensive fire-induced type
conversion of renosterveld shrublands to grasslands (Krug
et al.
2004
). In the
Mediterranean Basin forests and woodlands have been eliminated from low-lying
flat landscapes by human activities (Vallejo
et al.
2006
).
