Reviews and notices

ASHTON, Peter & Mary (ed.), The quaternary era in Malesia, being the Transactions of the Second Aberdeen-Hull Symposium on Malesian Ecology, Aberdeen 1971, 122 pp. (Dept. of Geography, Univ. of Hull, 1972). A paper to elucidate the late-Tertiary history was delivered by J. Muller. The era itself is the subject of papers by P.S. Ashton, by J.R. Flenley (see Bibliography), and by Lord Medway on the animals. Plenty of maps, pollen diagrams, and references are given; the discussions, long and high-level, have been recorded. The ’Epilogue’ gives a fine summary of the Quaternary era, here copied: ”Though this review emphasises how fragmentary our knowledge of the Quaternary history of South-east Asia is, it nevertheless presents what are probably all the essential events of that period which have determined the nature of the biomes that now exists there. These build up what at first appears to be a conflicting picture: On the one hand Lord Medway, with additional support from Dr. Wells in discussion, has provided indisputable evidence that a significant part of the obligate grassland fauna of the Continental Asiatic Middle Pleistocene Savanna penetrated to Java; the essentially seasonal climate of this habitat must therefore at least once also have straddled the equator through Sundaland during the Pleistocene. Further, Dr. Flenley has shown that significantly lower mean annual temperatures, perhaps as much as 5° C less than at present, obtained in the mountains of New Guinea as recently as c. 12000-8500 years B.P.