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Team Finds Earliest Signs of Humans Changing Ecosystems With Fire
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Landscape shows earliest effects of modern humans using fire to shape ecosystem
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The study, which appears in the journal
Science Advances, combines archaeological evidence dense clusters of stone artifacts dating as far back as 92,000 years ago with paleoenvironmental data on the northern shores of Lake Malawi in eastern Africa to document that early humans were ecosystem engineers. They used fire in a way that prevented regrowth of the region’s forests, creating a sprawling bushland that exists today.
“This is the earliest evidence I have seen of humans fundamentally transforming their ecosystem with fire,” says Jessica Thompson, assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University and the paper’s lead author. “It suggests that by the Late Pleistocene, humans were learning to use fire in truly novel ways. In this case, their burning caused replacement of the region’s forests with the open woodlands you see today.”
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Landscape shows earliest effects of modern humans using fire to shape ecosystem
Humans have used fire for millennia to lure out game when hunting and to convert woodland to agricultural land, leaving their mark on the landscape. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence from Lake Malawi, Africa, shows that the effects on the landscape of humans’ use of fire is tens of thousands of years older than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers.
“The vegetation in the area around Lake Malawi is a little mysterious,” said Sarah Ivory, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State. “It’s right in the middle of the tropics, and we think of tropical forests as being these icons of biodiversity where all the world’s species are housed. Yet here, in the middle of tropical Africa, is this extensive forest that is really species poor.”
55). The primary aim was to understand the subsurface distribution of artifacts and fan deposits across the larger landscape. Artifacts are typically deeply buried within the Chitimwe Beds in all places except at the margins, where erosion has begun to remove the top part of the deposit. During informal survey, two people walked across Chitimwe Beds that appear as mapped features on Government of Malawi geological maps. As these people encountered the shoulders of Chitimwe Bed deposits, they began to walk along the margins where they could observe artifacts eroding from the deposits. By placing excavations slightly (3 to 8 m) upslope from actively eroding artifacts, excavations could reveal their in situ locations relative to their containing sediments, without the necessity of laterally extensive excavations. Test pits were emplaced so that they would be 200- to 300-m distant from the next-nearest pit and thus capture the variation across Chitimwe Bed deposits and the artifacts they
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