Landscape burning facilitated Aboriginal migration into Lutruwita/Tasmania 41,600 years ago

Abstract

The establishment of Tasmanian Palawa/Pakana communities ~40 thousand years ago (ka) was achieved by the earliest and farthest human migrations from Africa and necessitated migration into high-latitude Southern Hemisphere environments. The scarcity of high-resolution paleoecological records during this period, however, limits our understanding of the environmental effects of this pivotal event, particularly the importance of using fire as a tool for habitat modification. 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.