> This particular fact somewhat undercuts your strong assertion:

My strong assertion, was not "there are no trees". Of course there are some trees of some size in some places. Not the same as an oak forest, but still.

My strong assertion was regarding how very unlikely "12,000 years of overlapping ring patterns" would be from the sparser and smaller and less long-lived vegetation.

You might want to look deeper into the links I provided re: dendrochronology.

There's no necessity for 12K years of volcano adjacent tree ring sources, any more than there's a requirement that the current immediate vicinity have many trees.

I can leave that for you to ponder, it's not hard to fathom why.

The scope of volcano eruption also comes into play, of course, there's a bunch of papers about tree rings and evidence of volcanic eruption wrt: The Black Death (1347 - 1353) in Europe with a wide separation between volcano and tree ring sites.

On a tangential note, of all the trees in all the arid places about the globe, these are some of my favourites: https://www.snexplores.org/article/carvings-australia-boab-t... and https://theconversation.com/the-boab-trees-of-the-remote-tan....

The Tanami's tough country, it's where the last people (known) to first encounter "western" civilisation walked out from. It's where several of them returned after a few years of exposure.( https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 )

Do you have any stories of your time in the Ethiopian Afar that provide first hand field experience for your strong assertion?

Getachew Eshete and Göran Ståhl did some work there in 1999 in the Rift Valley part of the Afar region that indicated Acacia growth rings can be used as climate indicators for the 30 year life span periods of the wood studied.