Significance: The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies. Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet.

Hunters exhibit high skill across the life span, individuals vary substantially in skill, and age-related peaks vary across sites.

Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia’s Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are conceived. These estates are transgenerational storehouses of relational wealth that operate in a delayed-return ritual economy. These storehouses were ransacked by colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, precipitating a collapse in the anthropogenic fire regime and a decline and extinction of many endemic species. Since returning to their homelands in the 1980s, Martu have reestablished a tight patchwork of vegetative succession and rescaled the landscape mosaic. Previous work has shown how the emergent ecological consequences of foraging and burning interact to create greater local diversity, increase landscape patchiness at massive spatial scales, and buffer against climate-driven ecosystem disturbance. In this paper we explore how the rescaling of patch diversity through anthropogenic fire operates as a form of dynamic cultural and ecological niche construction shaping systems of sociality among people and their interactions with other species.

In the mid-1950s Western Desert of Australia, Aboriginal populations were in decline as families left for ration depots, cattle stations, and mission settlements. In the context of reduced population density, an ideal free-distribution model predicts landscape use should contract to the most productive habitats, and people should avoid areas that show more signs of extensive prior use. However, ecological or social facilitation due to Allee effects (positive density dependence) would predict that the intensity of past habitat use should correlate positively with habitat use. We analyzed fire footprints and fire mosaics from the accumulation of several years of landscape use visible on a 35,300-km² mosaic of aerial photographs covering much of contemporary Indigenous Martu Native Title Lands imaged between May and August 1953. Structural equation modeling revealed that, consistent with an Allee ideal free distribution, there was a positive relationship between the extent of fire mosaics and the intensity of recent use, and this was consistent across habitats regardless of their quality. Fire mosaics build up in regions with low cost of access to water, high intrinsic food availability, and good access to trade opportunities; these mosaics (constrained by water access during the winter) then draw people back in subsequent years or seasons, largely independent of intrinsic habitat quality. Our results suggest that the positive feedback effects of landscape burning can substantially change the way people value landscapes, affecting mobility and settlement by increasing sedentism and local population density. Significance Models of human habitat choice and landscape use assume that people have negative effects on resource availability, which causes them to avoid regions that are already occupied or that show signs of extensive past use in favor of regions of higher quality. We show that when people engage in activities that increase resource productivity, like burning, there is the potential for these improvements to change habitat preferences in favor of places that have been previously modified and occupied by people. This process changes the way we think about intensification (and the origins of broad-spectrum economies), which may arise not from the negative effects of people on resources, but from the positive (and often unintentional) feedbacks between people and their environments.