Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf9776

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-humans-shape-landscape-fire-85000-years-ago-180977669/

Beginning in roughly 10,000 B.C., people around the world adopted large-scale farming as part of the Neolithic Revolution. But humans in need of resources have been shaping their surroundings for much, much longer than that. As a new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests, Stone Age people in southeastern Africa used fire to intentionally transform the landscape around Lake Malawi some 85,000 years ago.

“This is the earliest evidence I have seen of humans fundamentally transforming their ecosystem with fire,” says lead author Jessica Thompson, a paleoanthropologist at Yale University, in a statement. “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.”

Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf9776