- New World Words -

AI Looks to Ancient Knowledge for Help with Europe’s Wildfires

By Neil Munro – research by Gemini AI and ChatGPT

A friend in Serbia recently told me how frightened she and others have become by the wildfires threatening their parts of Europe.

 

It is an understandable fear. Every summer seems to bring images of forests and communities threatened by fire, with firefighters struggling against conditions that can turn a small blaze into an uncontrollable inferno.

 

But their concern prompted a rather different question:

What did the people who lived with these landscapes thousands of years ago know about fire that we may have forgotten?

 

An exploration using AI and the archaeological record produced a fascinating answer. Ancient Europeans used fire to change their environment.

 

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and later Neolithic communities deliberately burned vegetation for hunting, grazing and agriculture. Slash-and-burn farming created temporary fields, while carefully managed fires could encourage grasses, berries and other plants useful to both people and wildlife.

 

Evidence from Eastern Europe suggests that the relationship may have been more sophisticated than simply burning something because it needed clearing.

 

Across parts of the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania and northern Greece, charcoal and pollen records indicate that prehistoric communities repeatedly used low-intensity fire to influence the composition of forests. By opening the canopy and suppressing some competing vegetation, they could encourage hazel, berries and oak — effectively creating productive food forests while retaining mature trees.

 

Further east, around the forest-steppe landscapes of modern Ukraine and Moldova, regular burning helped maintain a mosaic of woodland, meadow and cultivated land. Rather than allowing one vegetation type to dominate, fire helped create a constantly changing landscape containing different habitats — supporting livestock, edible plants and wild game.

 

Further north, swidden agriculture provided another form of coexistence with fire.

 

Small areas of forest were burned and cultivated for a few years before being abandoned. The forest was then allowed to regenerate. Over decades, this created different stages of woodland succession, providing habitats for berries, herbs and wildlife.

 

There is an important distinction here.

These ancient European practices were not necessarily the same thing as the highly systematic cultural burning developed by Indigenous peoples in Australia and North America, where frequent, carefully timed fire became an integral part of managing entire ecosystems and reducing accumulated fuel.

 

Yet the underlying idea is strikingly similar:

Fire does not necessarily have to be the enemy. It can be part of the ecosystem.

 

That changes the question.

 Instead of asking only, “How do we put wildfires out?”, perhaps we should also ask: “How did people who lived within these landscapes so long ago learn to live with fire?”

 

Modern fire science has enormous advantages. We possess satellites, climate models, sophisticated firefighting equipment and decades of scientific research. But ancient people possessed something modern societies can sometimes lose — intimate, accumulated knowledge of the particular landscapes in which they lived.

 

They observed what happened when vegetation was burned lightly and frequently.

 

They observed what happened when it was left alone. They noticed which plants returned, which animals followed, and how the landscape changed over years and generations.

 

Perhaps the future of European fire management will require both forms of knowledge.

Not a return to the past.

Not a romantic belief that ancient people possessed all the answers.

But a willingness to ask whether some answers were once embedded in the way human beings lived within the landscape rather than standing outside it.

 

And perhaps that is where AI can make an unexpected contribution: not by replacing the scientists and people who know these landscapes today, but by helping us search an enormous human archive for knowledge that might otherwise remain scattered across archaeology, anthropology, ecology and the memories of traditional cultures.

 

Europe may not be able to prevent every wildfire.

But perhaps can become better at understanding the fire before it arrives.

 

The ancient question may have been less "How do we defeat fire?" and more "How do we live intelligently with it?"

That may be a question worth asking again.

 

(The image based on this text was created by Gemini AI)

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