Blame it on those damned Republican cavemen!

Study: global warming sparked by ancient farming methods

Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

[Lead author William] Ruddiman said that starting thousands of years ago, people would burn down a forest, poke a hole in the soil between the stumps, drop seeds in the holes and grow a crop on that land until the nutrients were tapped out of the soil. Then they would move on.

“And they’d burn down another patch of forest and another and another. They might do that five times in a 20-year period,” he said.