Native American influences on the Northern YellowstoneRange-Comment on Yonk et al. (2018)

摘要

Yonk et al. explored the prehistoric and historical role of humans in the ecology of Yellowstone National Park (YNP) in their paper titled "Human Influences on the Northern Yellowstone Range." They concluded that, for thousands of years, Native Americans shaped the landscape by purposely burning forests and by controlling the population size of big game animals by hunting. Those influences ceased when Native Americans were displaced by Euro-American expansion. According to Yonk et al.,1 that displacement had a significant ecological effect: "Because Native Americans actively shaped their environment, and because their actions have been largely ignored, minimized, or eliminated during the past 146 years, the ecological health of the Northern Range today differs dramatically from the primeval Northern Range." If true, this conclusion has significant implications for our understanding of the ecology of YNP and for resource management. But there are problems with the evidence on which that conclusion was based. I review some of those problems in this article.