Steelie, thanks for that backhanded support.
Turns out there's a growing body of academic work that recognizes something about North America -- it has been a managed landscape ever since humans came across from Asia.
Burning triggers a lot of vegetative changes that benefit hunting and food-gathering. It's not hard to grasp -- some of us have set fires on spring pasture to impressive results in the growing season. Indians certainly noticed where the game went after fires, and quickly caught on to triggering desired outcomes.
The bottom line is, much of North America was under intensive and deliberate vegetation management from the time the glaciers backed off. Indians set fires time and time again where those fires would either help hunting or mess with tribal enemies. Fire was a weapon and a tool, with "natural" fire dominating only in areas where it didn't make sense for an Indian to set a fire.
If Indians had invented iron before the white eyes, the world would have been different, for sure. But we must all remember, fire was a human tool, used by humans for thousands of years on this continent, and the "pristine" environments supposedly "discovered" by white people post Columbus were not really natural. What they were, mostly, were vegetative artifacts of human origin.
So yeah, fire, controlled and set by humans, WHEN THE CONDITIONS ARE RIGHT, need to play a role. Want an example? Try your local neighborhood Indian reservation and have a tribal forester walk you through their timber plans, with repeated entries, repeated set fires after harvesting, a light hand applied early and often, that makes a buck and produces great hunting, too.
