ArticleScientific reports2018
Lake sediment fecal and biomass burning biomarkers provide direct evidence for prehistoric human-lit fires in New Zealand.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 89 citations in OpenAlex.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18Nature communications · 2026Article
- Earliest evidence of making fire.Nature · 2026Article
- Advancing archaeological sedimentary lipid biomarker analysis: A review of recent developments and methodological guidelines.iScience · 2025Review
- Record of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from prehistoric sediments and human activity in the Lubei plain of China.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pastoral agriculture, a significant driver of New Zealand's economy, based on an introduced grassland ecology and technological advances.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2023Review
- Climate change and alpine-adapted insects: modelling environmental envelopes of a grasshopper radiation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Review
- Superficially described and ignored for 92 years, rediscovered and emended: Apodera angatakere (Amoebozoa: Arcellinida: Hyalospheniformes) is a new flagship testate amoeba taxon from Aotearoa (New Zealand).The Journal of eukaryotic microbiology · 2021Article
- Human arrival and landscape dynamics in the northern Bahamas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Geochemical Evidence for the Control of Fire by Middle Palaeolithic Hominins.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Deforestation associated with the initial settlement of New Zealand is a dramatic example of how humans can alter landscapes through fire. However, evidence linking early human presence and land-cover change is inferential in most continental sites. We employed a multi-proxy approach to reconstruct anthropogenic land use in New Zealand's South Island over the last millennium using fecal and plant sterols as indicators of human activity and monosaccharide anhydrides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, charcoal and pollen as tracers of fire and vegetation change in lake-sediment cores. Our data provide a direct record of local human presence in Lake Kirkpatrick and Lake Diamond watersheds at the time of deforestation and a new and stronger case of human agency linked with forest clearance. The first detection of human presence matches charcoal and biomarker evidence for initial burning at c. AD 1350. Sterols decreased shortly after to values suggesting the sporadic presence of people and then rose to unprecedented levels after the European settlement. Our results confirm that initial human arrival in New Zealand was associated with brief and intense burning activities. Testing our approach in a context of well-established fire history provides a new tool for understanding cause-effect relationships in more complex continental reconstructions.
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