UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Some of the wild plants that grow across the Australian landscape may not be so wild, according to new research led by Penn State scientists.
The researchers studied four wild Australian plants — three test species and one control group — and how the hunting-gathering practices of the Martu Aboriginal people affect where these non-domesticated plants grow on the landscape. They found that the three test species, especially the wild bush tomato, rely on human activity for seed dispersal. The findings, published in Nature Communications, challenge the conventional notion of agriculture and suggest that humans impacted plants’ genetic diversity long before the advent of farming.
“This research is one of the first to show that peoples who are not already engaged in agriculture are still having long-term effects on plant populations,” said Rebecca Bliege Bird, first author of the study and professor of anthropology at Penn State. “In Australia, we’re talking about 50,000 years of Aboriginal involvement with these plants.”
The Martu Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for thousands of years and largely maintained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the current day, eschewing the permanency of farming specific crops for their nomadic customs, the researchers explained. Many avoided contact with European settlers and their descendants until the 1960s, when the government removed them from their ancestral lands prior to conducting inter-ballistic missile tests. They began returning to their lands in the 1980s, according to the researchers.
To see how Martu customs and practices affect plant distribution across the landscape, the researchers focused on three edible plants important for sustenance and cultural identity — the bush raisin, the bush tomato and love grass, which the Martu winnow and turn into flour. The researchers also looked at the distribution of the fanflower, which is not actively foraged.