A Georgia Peat Fire Burned Down to Something Older Than the Swamp

What the textbooks call the Okefenokee Swamp and what actually lies beneath it are two entirely different worlds — and a series of Georgia peat fires has been forcing that confrontation for decades. When the 2007 Bugaboo Scrub Fire burned down through six feet of compressed organic material, crews were left standing on ground that had last seen open air thousands of years ago. Beneath the living swamp sat a ghost forest of ancient bald cypress, megafauna bone with possible stone-tool cut marks, and evidence that challenges the Clovis-first model of human prehistory in North America. The peat did not destroy this record. It saved it.