Posted on 05/31/2019 11:02:30 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Native Americans' use of fire to manage vegetation in what is now the Eastern United States was more profound than previously believed, according to a Penn State researcher who determined that forest composition change in the region was caused more by land use than climate change...
Over the last 2,000 years at least, according to Abrams -- who for three decades has been studying past and present qualities of eastern U.S. forests -- frequent and widespread human-caused fire resulted in the predominance of fire-adapted tree species. And in the time since burning has been curtailed, forests are changing, with species such as oak, hickory and pine losing ground...
The researchers found that in the northernmost forests, present-day pollen and tree-survey data revealed significant declines in beech, pine, hemlock and larches, and increases in maple, poplar, ash, oak and fir. In forests to the south, both witness tree and pollen records pointed to historic oak and pine domination, with declines in oak and chestnut and increases in maple and birch, based on present-day data...
Researchers also included human population data for the region, going back 2,000 years, to bolster their findings, which recently were published in the Annals of Forest Science. After hundreds of years of fairly stable levels of fire caused by relatively low numbers of Native Americans in the region, they report, the most significant escalation in burning followed the dramatic increase in human population associated with European settlement prior to the early 20th century. Moreover, it appears that low numbers of Native Americans were capable of burning large areas of the eastern U.S. and did so repeatedly.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
So, in addition to constantly being at war, raping their enemies wives and taking their enemies as slaves or torturing them enemies to death, Native Americans were wholesale burning forests. They must have been Republicans.
Hi.
My guess is dry conditions and lightning.
Or SUVs.
5.56mm
And the more vicious tribes were, Trump Republicans!
Me too. For about four hours at a time. No desire to stay there for much more than that.
So will Elizabeth Warren become an outdoor arsonist?
So will Elizabeth Warren become an outdoor arsonist?
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It’s an old family tradition, no doubt.
Stone age people have done these things for 1000s of years.
New growth after a forest fire is more edible and nutritious for wild game. This was land management toward increasing the meat supply.
“a huge pile of coal in the basement....”
And that heavy IRON DOOR low on the wall outside the coal storage room where thru the coal was delivered...THOSE WERE THE DAYS !! And after a few years, got a “stoker” to ‘automate’ the coal feeding....
I can still remember,shaking the ashes down, shoveling the coal from the coal bin——and then turning the dampers etc.
Seems like yesterday.
.
Yep, dirty, sooty, smelly.................It was fun................
It was that——or freeze. I DID love the old hissing, steam heat radiators though.
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Careful, there’s a strong push by the progressives to make people believe burning forests with wildfires is the best way to manage. The bigger the wildfire, the better is what they’re trying to brainwash us with.
It’s all nonsense.
Go in, get the logs, drive them out and sell them.
didn’t we see somewhere that the massive burning of the North American East Coast forests contributed to the Little Ice Age in Europe?
I doubt it, but that kinda rings a bell, as well, maybe we’ve got a topic around here somewhere...
Meanwhile...
http://www.google.com/search?q=new+england’s+darkest+day
I suspect that burning the understory during calm weather helped reduce the number of lightening caused wildfires that destroyed forests. Early settlers found large numbers of trees with 4 and more feet diameter trunks in forests that were burned regularly. Also the Shenandoah Valley and later prairies north of the Green River around Kentucky (if I remember correctly) were burned regularly to maintain a “buffalo common” where all Indians could hunt at will. I read about this elsewhere.
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