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Farming as we now associate the word has been around for about 7 to 10 thousand years and..

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when we think of farming we imagine a farmer planting seeds and later harvesting the crops

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or maybe having cattle that they can allow to graze

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and using that cattle later either for meat or milk or wool.

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But there's actually a different type of farming that predates

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this association with what we can call traditional form of farming.

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And it predates it by several tens of thousands of years

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and we believe it started with the original inhabitants of Australia.

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And what they did is, and this is why we call it farming,

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because if you think about farming in the most general sense

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is really humans using technology to manipulate their environment

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so it becomes more suitable for humans

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and more suitable for things that humans might want to eat

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or get milk from or ... or whatever.

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And this type of farming is called firestick farming.

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And I think you can already imagine what it might involve.

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It involves using fire which is really a form of technology

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or can be a form of technology,

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using fire to make the environment more suitable for human activity.

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And so what the original Australians did, the indigenous Australians,

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or sometimes we refer to them as the Aboriginal Australians.

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If you're wondering where the word Aboriginal comes from,

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you might recognise some parts of it:

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original - you know what that means, the first things

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the things that were there from the beginning,

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and then you have "ab", which is Latin for "from".

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So this is literally "from the beginning",

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so when we say Aboriginal Australians we're really

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kind of saying that they were there from the beginning.

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And so what they would do is that we believe if you go back 50-60,000 years

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before the first Aboriginal Australians settled Australia,

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Australia had much more forest. It still has forest,

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this is a modern picture of an Australian forest,

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but what they did is that they set up controlled burns.

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And what these controlled burns did is that

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they cleared away a lot of forest,

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they cleared away a lot of the brush that's at the bottom over here,

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and it made it much more suitable for grassland to develop.

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And the reason why they liked grassland -

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so let's make a little cycle here of what they did.

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So they have controlled burns, controlled fires

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those controlled fires helped promote grassland

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and then once you have grassland that made the environment

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more suitable for animals that the original human settlers could essentially live off of,

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that they could hunt, that they could potentially eat their meat,

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for example things like ... kangaroos

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and these supported the human population

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which obviously would then do the controlled burns.

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And you see here we could have started off with something like this,

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someone provides a controlled burn,

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and they were actually pretty scientifical about how they did it.

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They wouldn't just go with the end of summer

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when everything was hot and ready to just blow up

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and to start a fire that they couldn't control.

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They would often do these is seasons knowing that

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they had a certain level of moisture in the air, it wasn't too hot

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and to a large degree by doing these controlled burns,

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not only did it provide an environment

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that was suitable for things like kangaroos

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some type of thing that humans could eat,

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but it also prevented major fires.

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And you still see forest rangers doing this type of thing.

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There is some reason to believe that what the original Australians did

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on some level was more nuanced and more fine too

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than even what we do in a modern sense of controlled burns.

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So these controlled fires also prevented major, uncontrollable fires.

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Because what happens if you don't have these controlled fires,

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then you have brush building up year after year after year,

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you have stuff building up,

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and then when the fires do occure, they're not going to occure,

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they're less likely, the uncontrollable fires

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are less likely to start during the winter

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when the air is cool, when there might be some moisture,

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they're more likely to ocure in the dry seasons.

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So you have all this stuff built up, and then when the fire does happen,

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it happens in the driest season and then when it happens

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with all the stuff built up in the driest season

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it just becomes uncontrollable.

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One of the several by-products of this firestick farming

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we believe is a lot of the grassland in Australia now

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might have been more forested befor even when the first European settlers

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came in the late 1700s, they were kind of surprised

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when they went into what is now Sydney Harbour

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and they said:'Wow, look at all the grassland here,

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it almost looks like a park space!'

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And then they would like their sheep graze there

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and they were surprised, because they have driven out the original inhabitants,

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and then they were surprised when forest just started to grow up in that grassland.

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It was because the original Australians were actually controlling that forest growth

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to make it more inhabitable for things like kangaroos

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and then when the English settlers came

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they started to have their sheep grazing in those grasslands.

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And also it was responsible for the disappearance,

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we think of many major, or better mega-fauna.

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So really large animal that inhabited Australia for millions of years

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until humans showed up. And this is one of them, if you just to need to look at them.

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This is called Diprotodon optatum, or the giant wombat.

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And there are fossils of the giant wombat around 40-50,000 years ago,

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but they disappeared with humans showing up.

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And there're multiple ways we can think about why they disappeared.

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They might have, and this is probably the case,

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they might have been more dependent on the forest habitat,

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or this was a more favorable habitat for them than the grasslands,

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maybe because they ate leaves that were higher up.

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Or another thing is once the forest habitat goes away

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they were actually also easier to hunt down,

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or either way to think about it they might have just been hunted by humans.

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But we do see with humans coming to the Australian continent

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you start to see the disappearance, and this is not the only one,

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there were several major species of megafauna,

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of super-large animals that disappeared at that time period.