Ancient Fires on Southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada: A Change in Causal Mechanisms at about 2,000 ybp
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charcoal records were examined from seven sediment cores and two stratigraphic sections on southern Vancouver Island, Canada. Charcoal influx and climate trend regressions were established using high order polynomial functions. During the late-glacial (ca. 13,000–10,000 ybp), variations in the charcoal record suggest that fires likely responded to changes in fuel availability and climate. The high incidence of early-Holocene (ca. 10,000–7,000ybp) fires may have been partly modified by human activity, though it seems more likely that climate exerted the greatest control. A decrease in fires during the mid- and early late-Holocene from 7,000–4,000 and 4,000–2,000 ybp respectively is consistent with a regional moistening trend, implying that fires were climatically limited. In the late late-Holocene from 2,000 ybp–present, several sites record an increase in charcoal influx even though climate was continuing to moisten and cool, suggesting that non-climatic factors were responsible for the observed increase in fire activity. Estimates of native populations range up to thousands of people for southern Vancouver Island before the arrival of Europeans. These people were knowledgeable of fire, suggesting that humans were responsible for the increase in fires during the late late-Holocene cool, moist interval.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.071 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".