Yoshi Maezumi has completed a huge amount of research comparing two major fire drivers - humans and climate change. And spoiler alert! Humans always win. Yoshi’s work has focused on the Holocene, the most recent geological period. The Holocene is a warm period, that follows the highly variable Pleistocene and begins about 11,500 years ago.

Yoshi has done a huge amount of work to understand fire behaviour in South America. Yoshi has worked on understanding the role of fire in human crop cultivation throughout the Holocene. Yoshi’s work has increased our understanding of the ways humans have used fire to modify the landscape to aid crop cultivation. This understanding is a contrast to the view that indigenous peoples were almost entirely hunter gatherers.

This episode was recorded on 10th December 2021.

yoshimaezumi.wixsite.com/paleoecology

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