Researchers Uncover the Oldest Record of Humans Using Fire in Tasmania, Almost 2,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Known

Today, the island of Tasmania lies across the Bass Strait from southern Australia, but once, the two were connected by a land bridge. When humans first reached Tasmania’s rugged coastlines and mixed forests approximately 40,000 years ago, it was the southernmost place our species had ever settled. The Palawa, Tasmanian Indigenous people, call this island lutruwita.

Now, new evidence from charcoal and pollen provides the earliest known record of humans using fire on Tasmania. The discovery predates the previous oldest evidence of fire use on the island by about 1,700 years and demonstrates how these early Aboriginal communities shaped their environment through fire.

In a new study published this month in Science Advances, researchers show these early people used fire to shape and modify Tasmania’s dense and wet forest. By analyzing sediment cores—long, cylindrical samples of dirt that capture environmental conditions across time—scientists were able to analyze the pollen and charcoal that had built up.

“They both, surprisingly, went back quite a long way—longer than most other records in the region have been found to go,” says study co-author Simon Haberle, a paleoecologist at the Australian National University, to Cosmos’ Ellen Phiddian. The records also gave a glimpse into how vegetation and fire changed over the past 50,000 years or more, he adds.

Researchers analyzed ancient mud from islands that would have been part of the land bridge that linked Australia and Tasmania during the last ice age. The mud showed an increase in charcoal from fires 41,600 years ago, followed by different types of pollen 40,000 years ago, revealing a major change in vegetation. This suggests Aboriginal communities were clearing the forests to create open spaces, potentially for subsistence.

“Fire is an important tool, and it would have been used to promote the type of vegetation or landscape that was important to them,” says lead author Matthew Adeleye, a paleoecologist at the University of Cambridge in England, in a statement. It would have helped the early communities manage forests as they migrated.

Previously, the oldest known archaeological evidence of humans in Tasmania was from sediment in a cave, where researchers had found charcoal, animal bones and stone tools dating to roughly 39,900 years ago. But the new paper extends that record deeper into the past.

The findings are part of a growing body of research showing how fire moved with early human societies wherever they went, says Regan Dunn, a paleobotanist at the Natural History Museum Los Angeles County who wasn’t involved with the study, to Science’s Warren Cornwall. With this research, it’s becoming more clear that humans first leave their mark on the land through fire, followed by changes to the landscape, she tells the outlet.

In this case, those landscape changes came through the expansion of fire-adapted plant species, such as eucalyptus trees, concentrated on the wetter, eastern side of the islands in the Bass Strait, Adeleye says in the statement. The burning likely served to create spaces that produce more food or attract animals that could be hunted.

The study’s findings fit into the wider context of bushfires occurring across Tasmania and Australia today. As wildfires have raged through the forests, Aboriginal communities and scientists are thinking about ways to manage those disasters. One of these potential strategies includes traditional burning culture.

“Cultural fire management practices are integral to our agricultural practices and are medicine for Country,” Zena Cumpston, a Barkandji researcher at the University of Melbourne, wrote in the Conversation in 2020, during the peak of the extreme Australian bushfires from 2019 to 2020, which became one of the most catastrophic fire seasons in the nation’s recent history.

Cultural burning could potentially enhance the ecosystem’s health by improving soil quality and promoting growth, per the U.S. National Park Service. It enhances the habitat for plants and animals and makes it more resilient.

For Haberle, the information coming from Western science, including this new study, is less of a revelation and more of an affirmation that cultural burning has been essential to the landscape for many thousands of years, he tells Cosmos.

He adds that the Palawa “certainly know a lot of this story already.”

Editor’s Note, November 26, 2024: Terms in this story referring to the Aboriginal people of Tasmania have been updated in accordance with guidance on their preferred language.

Alexa Robles-Gil | | READ MORE

Alexa Robles-Gil is a bilingual science journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Undark, Inside Climate News and more.