CRYPTIC NORTHERN REFUGIA AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN BIOTA

Increasingly, recent developments in both palaeontology and phylogeography are causing certain workers to question the dominant views of where refugial areas for temperate organisms were located during the most recent (and presumably previous) cold episode(s). This debate had previously been restricted to one between palynologists, on the one hand, and plant-macro and mammalian palaeontologists on the other. The former believing that southern areas such as, in Europe, the peninsulas of Iberia, Italy and the Balkans were the sole refugia during glacials. The latter, meanwhile, finding evidence for more northerly-located refuges in the form of the charcoal of temperate trees and the bones of woodland mammals. The comparatively new science of phylogeography is generating evidence for both points of view and so debate continues. However, the fact phylogeography has found any evidence of northern refugia indicates that the absolutely dated fossils of, for instance, 13 kyr BP Oak charcoal in the Belgian Ardennes were not mistakenly interpreted.