Jingszo !

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.

Climate would have modulated Aboriginal landscape burning during the late Pleistocene, with people burning wet forested/wooded landscapes with high-intensity fires to promote open landscapes , and burned already open dry vegetation types with low-intensity fires to maintain desired conditions. The former likely resulted in high vegetation turnover with the decline in fire-intolerant plants, while the latter favored fire-adapted plants with low turnover. It is possible that Aboriginal people were able to modify and use wet forest communities, including rainforests, much more in the past than presently thought , creating community composition and/or structure very different from today’s wet forest communities.