Sahara Used to Be a Lush Garden

 Clearly I’m not smart enough to understand what these scientists think they understand.  What’s all the fuss about climate change-global warming today if they KNOW the Sahara desert used to be a lush garden?  Don’t they realize that by reporting this finding, which happened before millions of cars and power plants were here, just makes most of us who read it say, “yeah, the world has been changing for a long time…and it’s going to continue to change.  Men aren’t causing climate change today anymore than men were causing the Sahara to turn into a desert.”

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Currently a harsh, arid sandscape, it's hard to believe the Sahara was once studded with sparkling water bodies that nourished lush green savannas. But the remains of human pastoralists and their livestock have been found in the region's rock shelters.

"Evidence from ancient lake deposits, pollen samples, and archaeological artifacts confirm human presence, hunting, herding, and resource gathering in the currently arid desert region," Salem and team explain in their paper.

This shared Saharan human lineage took a different path from those in sub-Saharan Africa around the same time that modern humans first left the continent more than 50,000 years ago.

The lineage then remained relatively isolated for many thousands of years, with only small traces of genes entering from the Levantine region to the northeast – including some from  Neanderthals.

"Our findings suggest that while early North African populations were largely isolated, they received traces of Neanderthal DNA due to gene flow from outside Africa," says anthropologist Johannes Krause, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The Takarkori individuals had less Neanderthal DNA than the Moroccan foragers, but significantly more than those from further south of Africa. That suggests that something stemmed the gene flow from Europe from spreading beyond the Sahara region.

https://www.sciencealert.com/once-lush-sahara-was-home-to-a-surprisingly-unique-group-of-humans