Dear Dr. Barbolini and co-authors,

Thank you for your responses to the comments and suggestions of the two critical reviewers. Though there are some substantive concerns about key elements of the paper, your responses suggest that you are willing to address the concerns in revision.

I invite you to submit a revised manuscript that incorporates the revisions indicated in your response letter. I urge you to pay particular attention to justifying the zonation/interpretation of Zone II, or at the very least clearly lay out the statistical limitations of low-n zonation. I also urge you to provide further information on the stratigraphic context for this new section; this does not need to be exhaustive, considering the manuscript you have in preparation. Finally, Reviewer 1 had several suggestions for tightening the regional context for the research.

If you submit a revised manuscript, please provide a document specifying (with reference to page/line numbers) exactly how you have changed the manuscript in response to the reviewer comments. The revised manuscript will be sent out for re-review.

Sincerely,
Alberto Reyes (handling editor)

Dear Dr Yuan and colleagues,
I have gone over the reviewer comments and your manuscript revisions in response. In general, I think your revisions have done a good job addressing the criticisms of the reviewers, within the obvious limitations imposed by poor sample productivity in the upper part of the section. Your revisions have also added valuable paleoclimate and paleogeographic context... thank you for adding this.

Pending some minor revisions (detailed below), I'm happy to recommend that this manuscript be published in Climate of the Past.

Sincerely,
Alberto Reyes (handling editor)

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1. Yuan et al 2017 Paleoworld paper gives a slightly different account of the stratigraphic framework for the Gongjue Fm: the 2017 paper describes three members for the formation as a whole, but this manuscript gives those same three members within only the Eg3 unit of the formation. Please clarify for readers.

2. I realize that authors are preparing a separate manuscript with details on lithostrat, geochemistry, etc for this section. But because there is no published information on this section it is fair to ask for at least some additional brief details. Something like Table 1 in the Yuan et al 2017 paper would be sufficient, along with some representative photographs similar to Fig 2 of that same paper. Are there any potential linkages between lithofacies in the upper part of the section and the poor sample productivity in Zones 2 and 3? If so, please add some short on this point, since the poor pollen recovery in those zones is certainly problematic (as the authors already point out).

3. Somewhat related to the point above, I think it’s fair to ask that authors be even more circumspect about the problematic low pollen recovery from sediments assigned to Zones 2 and 3. This could be done easily at the start of the Results (lines 214): “Recovery is particularly poor in the upper half (~xx m) of the section.” This should then be followed up with caveats in the results section for those zones (section 4.1.2 and 4.1.3).

4. Authors have noted at one point in the Discussion that the tropical forest “spike” is only present in one sample, but elsewhere in the Discussion (lines 372 and 374) this spike is assigned to the entire Zone 2. Please revise to make it crystal clear that this spike only applies to one sample. e.g “….a significant spike in tropical forest pollen in one sample…” and “Although the increase in tropical forest taxa in one sample from this zone does not indicate…”

5. Very minor point: on line 200 you say you followed the approach of Hoorn et al to assign taxa to PFTs. Can you clarify if you followed the taxon-to-NLR assignments provided by Hoorn? If there are any deviations from this, or if this is not what you meant, please provide a supplemental table that explicitly gives the NLR and PFT associated with each taxon. Hmm, on second thought the supplemental pollen diagrams probably accomplish this already for the PFTs, at least.

Dear Dr. Barbolini and co-authors,
Thank you for addressing the few minor points raised in the last round of revision. I'm now happy to recommend that the manuscript be accepted for publication in Climate of the Past.

Sincerely, and best wishes,
Alberto Reyes