The development of active freshwater systems during these periods corresponds with monsoon intensity increases during insolation maxima, suggesting that humid periods in Arabia were not confined to eccentricity - paced deglaciations, and
providing paleoenvironmental support for multiple windows of opportunity for dispersal out of Africa during the late Pleistocene.
Indeed, hemlocks
provide «arguably the most important natural archive of annually resolved
paleoenvironmental data across eastern North America,» write Hessl and forest ecologist Neil Pederson of the Lamont - Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.
Recent discoveries of the dung deposits of Pleistocene animals in dry caves and alcoves on the Colorado Plateau, including those of mammoth, bison, horse, sloth, extinct forms of mountain goats, and shrub oxen, have
provided floristic assemblages from which temperature and moisture requirements for such assemblages can be deduced in order to develop
paleoenvironmental reconstructions tied to an absolute chronology.