Sahara, on and off

From Alton Parrish's blog of press-releases, comes a presentation held last Monday: delivery of African dust to the Canary Islands between ~4.8-2.8 Ma, ~3.0-2.9 Ma, ~2.3-1.46 Ma, and ~0.4 Ma. This blog doesn't much cover anything pre-Neander / Heidelberg; but I will pipe in to say that the first two spans overlap. Unfortunately Parrish hasn't called them on it (a man after Jessica Saraceni's own heart...).

Interesting to me is that last, 400,000 BP/BC sandstorm over the Canaries. Is that one ongoing? Even given distrust of the timeline, a 400ky desert isn't unprecedented here. That "~2.3-1.46 Ma" is probably accurate, and longer.

What do we make of Green Sahara in our Mesolithic, 8000ish BC? And what of the Eemian - the Neanders' Holocene, up north? Here's a paper that puts Sahara Eemian 126–120k BC. Here: wooded grassland occurrences (10–40% woody cover) across the Sahara, which is supported by the occurrence of tropical humid plants (Ficus, Celtis, and ferns) and subtropical vertebrate fauna as far north as 23–26°N in the Western Desert. I do note that the best Sahara times are only a subset of the overall warm period in each, themselves mere blips in the long Pleistocene winter. Still: are these six-millennium pauses in the deserts recent enough, and non-sandy enough, to (not) show up in Canary rock layers?

BACKDATING 9/25