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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Stephen Pyne [asu.edu], expert on the history of fire [youtu.be], published an interesting open access commentary [wiley.com] regarding the relationship between humans and fire. He argues that the rise of the command of fire occurred as the Pleistocene [wikipedia.org] (the "ice age") was ending, and the world going back as far as Homo erectus has been fundamentally changed by the human command of fire. He notes that all the defining features of an ice age (ice sheets, pluvial lakes, permafrost, and outwash plains) have been replaced with fire equivalents (fire‐informed biotas, fire‐famished ecosystems, melting permafrost, and megapalls of smoke).

Fire offers a special perspective by which to understand the Earth being remade by humans. Fire is integrative, so intrinsically interdisciplinary. Fire use is unique to humans, so a tracer of humanity's ecological impacts. Anthropogenic fire history shows the long influence of humans on Earth and even climate; in particular, it tracks the continuities between the burning of living landscapes and the transition to burning lithic (fossil) ones, an inflection so immense that climate history is now a subnarrative of fire history. Through our varied burnings, humans are driving out all the relics of the Pleistocene and replacing them with fire equivalents, or in short, creating a Pyrocene.

S. J. Pyne, From Pleistocene to Pyrocene: Fire Replaces Ice, Earth's Future, 8, 11, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001722 [doi.org]

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