Don’t know why this study is such grandstanding science. It’s been known in modern science that North Africa was once part of the Fertile Crescent. It was taught in one of my earliest geography/geology classes in college. The crusty old professor back then, even quoted the Biblical implications of it, since climate change science wasn’t even a serious study back then. And because we’ve understood that climate changes are merely cyclic.
The only reason that the study is serious these days is because universities realized through creating hysteria that they could get mucho $’s to get research grants and funding.
North Africa was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Then things got drier, and the Arabs came with their goat herds overgrazing the land.