Human-driven fires have shaped the Amazonian forest for over 10,000 years

New research is dismantling the longstanding myth of the "pristine" Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites—including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material—shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one.

≈