Abstract
Recent discoveries of fossil-bearing Holocene lake sediments from the eastern Sahara have brought further confirmation and detail to earlier indirect evidence that a major pluvial episode occurred between 9,500 and 4,500 yr BP1–3. The botanical results, mainly palynological, show that savanna and desert grassland occupied regions that today are plantless hyperarid deserts. We present here the first evidence from the entire Saharan region of a latitudinal zonation of Holocene vegetation, extending across a 500-km wide belt in north-west Sudan. We have completed detailed pollen analyses of three of the several sites discovered so far, and the salient features from two, the northernmost and the southernmost, are presented here to demonstrate a steep gradient of past vegetative cover.
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References
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Ritchie, J., Haynes, C. Holocene vegetation zonation in the eastern Sahara. Nature 330, 645–647 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/330645a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/330645a0
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