Do you have a source? I think this is possibly a misunderstanding. Australia's aboriginals did controlled burns, but Australia's desert predates humans (from my research).

[–] Mysterious_old_man 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming#:~:text=Fire%2Dstick%20farming%2C%20also%20known,practised%20for%20thousands%20of%20years.

"Aboriginal burning has been proposed as the cause of a variety of environmental changes, including the extinction of the Australian megafauna, a diverse range of large animals which populated Pleistocene Australia. Palynologist A. P. Kershaw has argued that Aboriginal burning may have modified the vegetation to the extent that the food resources of the megafauna were diminished, and as a consequence the largely herbivorous megafauna became extinct.[9]"