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Indigenous Australians started fire farming 11,000 years ago

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Aboriginal elder George Milpurrurr shows his children how to make a controlled fire to burn off dangerous dry grass.

Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy

Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for thousands of years. Researchers analysed charcoal that was preserved in the sediment of a flooded sinkhole over the last 150,000 years. They discovered that, around 11,000 years ago, there was a shift to more frequent but less intense fires as a result of Indigenous fire-stick farming. European colonization mostly brought an end to the practice, which might have contributed to the return of more high-intensity wildfires.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature Geoscience paper

The first immune-cell therapy for solid tumours, Iovance Biotherapeutics’ lifileucel, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. At least 20 people with advanced melanoma will receive the treatment, which uses cancer-killing immune cells extracted from a person’s own tumour. Researchers hope that the approval will pave the way for cheaper versions — lifileucel costs more than half a million dollars — as well as similar therapies for other cancers, including lung and pancreatic tumours.

Nature | 5 min read

Both the US and Chinese climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, are stepping down — and scientists worry that the change will rattle the cooperative spirit between the world’s two biggest carbon emitters. The new envoys, diplomat Liu Zhenmin and strategist John Podesta, bring some climate credentials, but it remains to be seen how well they work together. The upcoming US elections and broader geopolitical tensions remain major hurdles to achieving global climate goals. “The biggest uncertainty is American politics,” says public policy researcher Wang Yi.

Nature | 7 min read

US$1.26 billion

The cost of restoring Ukraine’s public research infrastructure destroyed or stolen because of the Russian invasion, according to the cultural organization UNESCO. (Reference: UNESCO report)

Features & opinion

The cold war-era laws that govern space exploration are not fit for purpose any more, argues philosopher A. C. Grayling in Who Owns the Moon? Without a bold new consensus, Grayling predicts, a space ‘wild west’ is going to emerge as nations and companies clamour for extraterrestrial resources. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the law of the sea could both provide templates for negotiations, but neither agreement transposes readily to outer space, says reviewer and Space Governance Lab founder Timiebi Aganaba. Instead, there could be lessons to learn from the ongoing climate change-induced reconsideration of resource exploitation, she says. “Any future dispute-resolution mechanisms must balance inclusivity and justice.”

Nature | 7 min read

Neuroscientist Roger Guillemin spent much of the 1950s and 60s dissecting millions of sheep brains and separating their peptides with 3-metre-tall chromatography columns that extended through the lab’s ceiling. His efforts paid off: he determined the structure of the thyrotropin-releasing factor, a small peptide that triggers a cascade of hormones that regulate metabolic activity in nearly every tissue of the body. What followed was a torrent of advances in neuroendocrinology, including more than two dozen drugs to treat endocrine disorders and cancers. In 1977, Guillemin shared the Nobel Prize with Andrew Schally, his former student turned competitor. Guillemin has died, aged 100.

Nature | 5 min read

The editors of Nature Reviews Physics and Nature Human Behaviour have teamed up to explore the pros and cons of using generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT in science communication. Chatbots ‘hallucinate’ convincing inaccuracies and they make churning out disinformation all too easy, write the editors — and they have “an obvious, yet underappreciated” downside: they have nothing to say. Ask an AI system to write an essay or an opinion piece and you’ll get “clichéd nothingness” — “the AI system has no agency in writing or otherwise.”

Interviews with six experts in Nature Human Behaviour reveal that they broadly agree that generative AI systems can be useful tools. But they are clear-eyed about the risks. “Given the much-publicized propensity of generative AI tools to produce nonsense, science communicators should consider whether generative AI is in fact completely antithetical to the very purpose of their work,” says Amanda Alvarez, a communications specialist at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence.

In Nature Reviews Physics, seven other experts delve into the key role of science communication in building trust between scientists and the public. “Regular, long-term dialogical interaction, preferably face-to-face, is one of the most effective ways to build a relationship based on trust,” notes science-communication researcher Kanta Dihal. “This is a situation in which technological interventions may do more harm than good.”

Nature Reviews Physics editorial | 4 min read, Nature Human Behaviour feature | 10 min read & Nature Reviews Physics viewpoint | 16 min read

Where I work

Lerato Seleteng-Kose walking through Bokong Nature Reserve in Lesotho while researching plants and the environment.

Lerato Seleteng-Kose is a botanist working at the National University of Lesotho in Roma.Credit: Barry Christianson for Nature

“It’s almost always windy and cold up here,” says botanist Lerato Seleteng-Kose about the Bokong Nature Reserve, where she tracks plants such as the Lesotho red-hot poker (Kniphofia caulescens). “Lesotho provides water to some of the most populous parts of neighbouring South Africa, so the health of these wetlands matters to a large number of people.” (Nature | 3 min read) (Barry Christianson for Nature)

Do you have a great mentor?

Applications are now open for the Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science, which this year recognizes mentors in West Africa who have made a significant contribution to their mentees’ careers. There are two categories, one for lifetime achievements and one for mid-career achievements. Find out more or nominate someone here.

Quote of the day

The sign-language lexicon that chemist Christina Goudreau Collison co-developed removes some of the time lag for Deaf students and their interpreters who would have had to painstakingly fingerspell the names of hundreds of chemical reactions. (Nature | 6 min read)

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Indigenous Australian fire-stick farming began at least 11,000 years ago

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Aboriginal elder George Milpurrurr shows his children how to make a controlled fire to burn off dangerous dry grass.

Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy

Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience1.

The practice of cultural burning, also known as ‘fire-stick farming’, is integral to Indigenous Australian culture and history, and is understood to have profoundly altered landscapes across the country.

Fire-stick farming involves introducing frequent, low-intensity fires in small areas of the landscape in a patchy, ‘mosaic’ pattern, and is done early in the dry season. The practice is important culturally and environmentally; in particular, it reduces the amount of fuel available for burning and therefore decreases the intensity of wildfires that might spark late in the dry season because of lightning strikes or other triggers.

Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have continuously occupied the Australian continent for at least 65,000 years2, but little is known about when the practice of fire-stick farming began.

“You need a really long record that goes back before people were here so you can see what the natural world — the definitively unimpacted world, if you’d like — looks like and then you’ve got enough of a record to be able to see if anything changed,” says study co-author Michael Bird, a geologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

The researchers found that record in the sediment of Girraween Lagoon, a permanent water body formed in a collapsed sinkhole near Darwin in the Northern Territory. The lagoon is an important site for the traditional owners of the land, the Larrakia Nation, and was made famous by the crocodile attack scene in the 1986 film Crocodile Dundee.

Because the lagoon has remained full, its sediments offer a continuous record of deposition that has not been disturbed by drying out and cracking. Bird and his colleagues were able to extract a core from the bottom of the lagoon that provided a 150,000-year-long record of changes in the type and geochemistry of the deposited charcoal, and in the accumulation of pollen.

Change in the charcoal

The team notes that, around 11,000 years ago, the changes in the charcoal deposits point to alterations in the intensity of fires in the area.

Without human influence, fires are less frequent but have enough intensity to burn trees and leave behind charcoal, says Bird.

“A less-intense fire doesn’t get into the crown — it’s burning what’s on the ground,” he says. The grass, as well as twigs and fallen tree leaves, are more likely to become charcoal than the trees themselves, he adds.

Because tree-derived charcoal has higher concentrations of the isotope carbon-13 than does charcoal from grasses, the researchers analysed the composition and geochemistry of the burnt residue in the sample. The authors found a sustained change from low-frequency, high-intensity fires — the ‘natural’ fire regime — to more frequent but less intense ones, which they suggested was the result of Indigenous fire-stick farming.

The authors ruled out climate change as the cause of the shift by using the ratio of tree pollen to grass pollen as a type of climate history to show that vegetation changes did not explain the shift in the charcoal record.

However, Bird notes that European colonization has mostly brought an end to cultural burning practices, and has shifted fire intensity back towards a natural pattern. “Because we’ve had, 10,000 plus years of a particular fire regime, it’s the release from that fire regime that’s actually creating quite significant issues,” he says, suggesting that this shift has contributed to the return of more high-intensity wildfires.

Joe Fontaine, a fire ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, says that the growing understanding of how cultural burning has shaped the Australian landscape, particularly in the northern regions, is crucial for contemporary fire-management practices, which to a large extent have excluded Indigenous people and their expertise.

“The barriers to doing cultural burning, in our arcane system of laws and bureaucracy,” are challenging to overcome, Fontaine says. There are also many more permanent structures in the landscape nowadays than there were before colonization, he says, so the challenge is to work out where and how cultural burning can be restored as a practice.

The continuing work that “puts cultural burning practices out there and establishes it as something that really existed, is crucial to the evolution of contemporary fire management,” he says.

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Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World’s Groundwater Supply

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That is certainly the case in Yemen, on the south flank of the Arabian Peninsula, where the desert sands have a new look these days. Satellite images show around 100,000 solar panels glinting in the sun, surrounded by green fields. Hooked to water pumps, the panels provide free energy for farmers to pump out ancient underground water. They are irrigating crops of khat, a shrub whose narcotic leaves are the country’s stimulant of choice, chewed through the day by millions of men.

For these farmers, the solar irrigation revolution in Yemen is born of necessity. Most crops will only grow if irrigated, and the country’s long civil war has crashed the country’s electricity grid and made supplies of diesel fuel for pumps expensive and unreliable. So, they are turning en masse to solar power to keep the khat coming.

The panels have proved an instant hit, says Middle East development researcher Helen Lackner of SOAS University of London. Everybody wants one. But in the hydrological free-for-all, the region’s underground water, a legacy of wetter times, is running out.

The solar-powered farms are pumping so hard that they have triggered “a significant drop in groundwater since 2018 … in spite of above average rainfall,” according to an analysis by Leonie Nimmo, a researcher who was until recently at the UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory. The spread of solar power in Yemen “has become an essential and life-saving source of power,” both to irrigate food crops and provide income from selling khat, he says, but it is also “rapidly exhausting the country’s scarce groundwater reserves.”

In the central Sana’a Basin, Yemen’s agricultural heartland, more than 30 percent of farmers use solar pumps. In a report with Musaed Aklan, a water researcher at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, Lackner predicts a “complete shift” to solar by 2028. But the basin may be down to its last few years of extractable water. Farmers who once found water at depths of 100 feet or less are now pumping from 1,300 feet or more.

Some 1,500 miles to the northeast, in in the desert province of Helmand in Afghanistan, more than 60,000 opium farmers have in the past few years given up on malfunctioning state irrigation canals and switched to tapping underground water using solar water pumps. As a consequence, water tables have been falling typically by 10 feet per year, according to David Mansfield, an expert on the country’s opium industry from the London School of Economics.

An abrupt ban on opium production imposed by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers in 2022 may offer a partial reprieve. But the wheat that the farmers are growing as a replacement is also a thirsty crop. So, water bankruptcy in Helmand may only be delayed.

“Very little is known about the aquifer [in Helmand], its recharge or when and if it might run dry,” according to Mansfield. But if their pumps run dry, many of the million-plus people in the desert province could be left destitute, as this vital desert resource—the legacy of rainfall in wetter times—disappears for good.

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Dyson Farming technology tour with James Dyson

Dyson Farming technology tour by James Dyson

James Dyson, known mainly for his innovative vacuum cleaner technology company, has taken on a new challenge: transforming the way we farm. With the acquisition of a vast expanse of English farmland, Dyson is pioneering a blend of sustainability and large-scale agriculture. His goal is to create a model of farming that is both productive and environmentally conscious.

At the heart of Dyson’s agricultural project is a deep commitment to caring for the environment. He has set aside a large area of his land to boost biodiversity, creating a sanctuary for bees and other pollinators that are crucial to the ecosystem. The addition of hedges and stone walls provides habitats for wildlife, showing that it’s possible to have a thriving farm that also supports nature.

Dyson Farming

Dyson’s approach to improving soil health is to use livestock. By integrating 10,000 sheep and cattle into his farming practices, he is not only enhancing the soil but also aiming to produce higher-quality crops. This method reflects Dyson’s dedication to advancing agriculture in a way that is mindful of the planet. Dyson Farming farms a range of produce at scale including wheat and barley, potatoes, onions, and peas. It also rears sheep and cattle.

Dyson Farming technology tour

One of the standout features of Dyson’s farm is the anaerobic digester. This facility takes leftover crops and turns them into renewable energy, which can power thousands of homes. The by-products from this process are used to heat greenhouses and dry grain, showcasing a model of a circular economy where nothing goes to waste. The business grows British strawberries out of season in its state-of-the-art 26-acre glasshouse which is heated by the innovative anaerobic digester.

“Established in 2012, Dyson Farming is one of the largest farming businesses in the UK, extending to 36,000 acres across Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset. It is a family-owned enterprise unlike any other, focussed on long-term investment in British farming and the countryside. Sustainable food production, food security and the environment are vital to the UK’s health and economy and James Dyson believes there is a real opportunity for technology to drive a revolution in agriculture. Dyson Farming is developing new approaches to efficient, high-technology agriculture and food production, in harmony with the natural environment, to create a positive farming model for the future.”

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The farm also boasts a high-tech greenhouse where strawberries are grown year-round. Innovative techniques like using ultraviolet light to prevent mold and employing robots for pest control and harvesting are part of Dyson’s strategy to reduce food imports and increase Britain’s self-sufficiency in food production.

The collaboration between Dyson’s engineers and the farming team is a driving force behind these agricultural advancements. Their joint efforts are not only pushing the boundaries of farming technology but may also lead to the development of new products for the Dyson brand.

Dyson’s strategic move into agriculture is marked by his relentless drive for sustainability and innovation. His farming methods could have a significant impact on the agricultural industry, serving as a guide for future farming practices that balance high productivity with environmental care.

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