Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a “resource management” strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. In our recent publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our research team combines ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Our results clearly demonstrate that anthropogenic landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages than landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of scale, not of kind. Anthropogenic landscapes (consisting of 15 circular samples of 28 km2 centered on foraging camps visited in 2002) averaged 64 different successional patches of 58 ha with an edge density of 2.1 m/ha and a mean Shannon’s Diversity Index of 1.15.  “Natural” landscapes (15 randomly chosen circles) were more coarse-grained, averaging 21 patches of 190 ha, with an edge density of 1.0 m/ha and a mean SDI of .63. Landscape scale (edge density) was directly linked to foraging for small, burrowed prey (monitor lizards, a specialty of Aboriginal women), increasing by 1.15 m/ha with each forager-hour allocated to lizard hunting. The continued maintenance of small-scale habitat mosaics provides future benefits in the form of increased small-animal hunting productivity, with edge density explaining 11% of the variation in lizard hunting return rates overall, and 55% of the variability in return rates when foragers do not or cannot burn extensive areas for hunting. These results have implications for understanding the unique biodiversity of the Australian continent, through time and space. In particular, we suggest that anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of Western Desert paleolandscapes were likely to be spatially localized and linked to less mobile, “broad-spectrum” foraging economies. We suggest that it was  unlikely that late-Pleistocene/early-Holocene human populations were dense enough or sedentary enough to control the lightning fire regime and maintain anthropogenic landscapes, at least not on a pan- Australian scale, challenging the hypothesis that immediately after the arrival of humans, continent-wide habitat modification caused a rapid trophic collapse and the extinction of Pleistocene fauna.