La Trobe

Landscape burning facilitated Aboriginal migration into Lutruwita/Tasmania 41,600 years ago

journal contribution
posted on 2025-01-31, 02:24 authored by Matthew A. Adeleye, F Hopf, SG Haberle, Georgia RobertsGeorgia Roberts, DB Mcwethy, S Harris, DMJS Bowman
The establishment of Tasmanian Palawa/Pakana communities ~40 thousand years ago (ka) was achieved by the earliest and farthest human migrations from Africa and necessitated migration into high-latitude Southern Hemisphere environments. The scarcity of high-resolution paleoecological records during this period, however, limits our understanding of the environmental effects of this pivotal event, particularly the importance of using fire as a tool for habitat modification. We use two paleoecological records from the Bass Strait islands to identify the initiation of anthropogenic landscape transformation associated with ancestral Palawa/Pakana land use. People were living on the Tasmanian/Lutruwitan peninsula by ~41.6 ka using fire to penetrate and manipulate forests, an approach possibly used in the first migrations across the last glacial landscape of Sahul.

Funding

This research was made possible through an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage support grant CE170100015 (to S.G.H.) and in-country support from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.

History

Publication Date

2024-11-15

Journal

Science Advances

Volume

10

Issue

46

Article Number

eadp6579

Pagination

9p.

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science

ISSN

2375-2548

Rights Statement

© 2024 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.

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