Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis

Abstract

Objective: Climate change has long been recognized as a significant driver of dietary diversity and dietary quality. An often overlooked aspect of climate change are shifts in fire regimes, which have the potential to drastically affect landscape diversity, species distributions, and ultimately, human diets. Here, we investigate whether the fire regimes shaped by Indigenous Australians change landscape diversity in ways that improve dietary quality, considering both the diversity and the quantity of traditional foods in the diet. Methods: We use structural equation modeling to explore two causal models of dietary quality, one focused on the direct effects of climate change and resource depression, the other incorporating the dietary effects of landscape diversity, itself a product of fire-created patchiness. We draw on a focal camp dataset covering 10 years of observations of Martu foraging income in the Western Desert of Australia.Results: We find strong support for the hypothesis that fire-created patchiness improves diet quality. Climate change (cumulative 2-year rainfall) has only an indirect effect on dietary quality; the availability of traditional foods is mediated primarily through the landscape diversity shaped by fire.Conclusions: Our model suggests that the loss of the indigenous fire mosaic may lead to worsening availability of traditional foods, measured as both caloric intake and diet diversity. Because the effects of rainfall are mediated through landscape diversity, increased rainfall may not compensate for the recent changes in fire regimes resulting from the loss of Aboriginal fire from the landscape.

Contributions of evolutionary anthropology to understanding climate‐induced human migration

“…The global distribution of humans is itself made possible by our ability to adapt—both culturally and physiologically—to a wide range of environments with vastly different climates. This climate diversity and the cultural adaptations that people employ to survive and reproduce in such environments is clearly represented in this special issue, from the Arctic tundra to the Australian desert (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2020 ; Kramer & Hackman, 2020 ; Pisor & Jones, 2020a ; Pisor & Jones, 2020b ; Ready & Collings, 2020 ; Scaggs et al, 2021 ). This set of specialized knowledge and behaviors in the context of a location has been referred to as the cultural niche (Ready & Price, 2021 ).…”

“…Very local risks (e.g., an eroding cliff) may be more easily managed than widespread risks (e.g., a rising river). Migration itself may be one of the key strategies that humans use to manage such risk (Pisor & Jones, 2020a ; Pisor & Jones, 2020b ), a problem if historical mobility patterns have been constrained (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2020 ).…”

“…In HBE and evolutionary archaeology, mobility studies ask questions about human movement at all spatial scales, from foraging distances (e.g., Bliege Bird & Bird, 2020 ; Wood et al, 2021 ), to visiting friends and family in neighboring communities (e.g., Pisor & Jones, 2020a ; Pisor & Jones, 2020b ), to crossing seas to colonize unoccupied islands (e.g., Giovas & Fitzpatrick, 2014 ). The behavior typified by this last example is also termed migration or dispersal , where the movement is associated with switching one's place of habitual residence from one location to another.…”

How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences?

“…For example, when Bliege Bird and Bird were first invited to visit Martu communities in Western Australia (e.g., Bliege Bird & Bird, 2021), elders expressed interest in their focus on hunting and gathering, stressing how the lack of knowledge about fire and its links to hunting and the health of both country and people was the source of conflict with local pastoralists and tourists. It was also clear that employing people as research assistants perpetuated colonial structures of inequality by forcing both researchers and Martu into “boss” and “worker” roles.…”

“…We have the tools, experience, and perspectives to understand the diverse range of human-environment interactions, past and present, and to unify scattered empirical observations about human biology and behavior from across disciplines, often under approaches like Indigenous studies or political economy (Gibson & Lawson, 2015;Jones, 2009;Smith, 2013). We can bring diversity to conversations about policy and human nature by injecting data from contemporary peoples whose perspectives are often absent (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2021;Broesch et al, 2020;Hazel et al, 2021;Kramer & Hackman, 2021;Pisor & Jones, 2021b;Ready & Collings, 2021), as well as past peoples whose experiences are instructive but often forgotten (Douglass & Rasolondrainy, 2021;Kohler & Rockman, 2020). Given that the story of human evolution is one of adaptation to changing climates (Behrensmeyer, 2006), EBAs are exceedingly well-positioned to contribute to debates about current and future adaptation to climate change (Pisor & Jones, 2021a)-and contribute we should, now, as climate change threatens to displace 2-4 billion people in the next 50 years (Xu et al, 2020).…”