A dive into the deep past reveals Indigenous burning helped suppress bushfires 10,000 years ago
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Monday, April 17, 2023
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Indigenous cultural burning involves applying frequent, small and low-intensity or “cool” fires to clean out grasses and undergrowth.
Key Points:
- Indigenous cultural burning involves applying frequent, small and low-intensity or “cool” fires to clean out grasses and undergrowth.
- Our findings suggest Indigenous cultural burning in the past may have helped reduce the intensity of bushfires.
When did cultural burning start in Australia?
- Another point of view suggests cultural burning was adopted only in the last few thousand years.
- Some current cultural burning programs in Australia were only established or re-established in the second half of the 20th Century.
- Our research sought to shed light on when cultural burning in southeast Australia began, and what effect it had.
A spotlight on charcoal
- From these sediments, we examined the accumulation of charcoal – a common method used to determine the frequency and relative size of bushfires.
- It determines bushfire severity based on the chemical composition of the charcoal produced.
- Recent research by our UNSW lab showed how traditional charcoal techniques may mask evidence of human fire use (in the form of cool fires).
Our results
- This suggests human-caused climate change will continue to influence overall fire conditions in future.
- But we found a marked difference between the two time periods when looking at the severity of fire.
- Despite significant climatic change over the last 18,000 years, fire severity remained lower, when compared to the earlier period without humans.
Looking ahead
- Inevitably, thoughts return to the massive Black Summer bushfire season of 2019-2020 and how to prevent such disasters in future.
- Adopting cultural burning as part of our toolkit is likely to minimise wildfires and help keep people safe.