"This research is one of the first to show that peoples who are not already engaged in agriculture are still having long-term effects on plant populations," said Rebecca Bliege Bird, the study's lead author and anthropology professor at Penn State. "In Australia, we're talking about 50,000 years of Aboriginal involvement with these plants."
The Martu people, who have lived in Australia for millennia, traditionally followed a nomadic lifestyle, relying on hunting and gathering rather than farming. The study reveals that this way of life has had a significant impact on certain plant species. The researchers focused on three edible plants important to the Martu - bush raisin, bush tomato, and love grass - as well as fanflower, a plant not foraged by the Martu, to understand how their practices shaped the landscape.
Over a decade of fieldwork, the researchers joined Martu harvesters on foraging expeditions, studied plant distribution, and analyzed data from ecological surveys and satellite imagery. The research team found that the Martu's use of landscape fires to hunt animals also plays a crucial role in the propagation of these plants. The seeds of plants like the bush tomato are often dispersed after being processed by the Martu, further influencing where the plants grow.
"The findings call into question our whole notions of what agriculture is," said Douglas Bird, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Rather than thinking about the difference between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies as a matter of kind, we'd be better off thinking about it as a matter of degree - that people influence plants long before they engage in what we think of as farming."
These insights also have broader implications for conservation. The researchers argue that recognizing the role of indigenous practices in shaping landscapes is essential for creating effective conservation strategies and supporting indigenous rights to land and resources.
"In Australia, the importance of an anthropogenic - or human-influenced - landscape for certain species was just critical in the 20th century," Bliege Bird explained. "In addition to promoting the persistence of edible plants, many small native mammals in Australia, especially those in the desert, relied on the anthropogenic fire mosaic. When Aboriginal fire activity was removed, a lot of those small animals went extinct locally or even on a continental scale."
Research Report:Seed dispersal by Martu peoples promotes the distribution of native plants in arid Australia
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