Abstract:
This is a comment on the article of Burrough et al. (2012) in which they present a palaeoclimatic
reconstruction based on phytolith assemblages from sandy shoreline deposits in the Makgadikgadi Basin,
Botswana. While this work highlights a potentially important paleoenvironmental archive in a notably
data-poor region, there are several fundamental short-comings in the Burrough et al. work in terms of
the calibration of their findings with plant distributions and ecology. Not recognising these limitations in
their article, the authors apply palaeoenvironmental indices that are regionally inappropriate, and which
we argue in turn render their paleoenvironmental interpretations invalid. With no regionally specific
reference collection being established, it may be the misidentification of phytolith morphotypes that has
created the paradox that is posed by Burrough et al.