Quaternary environmental change in the Indonesian region

Biogeographically, there has been an interest in the Indonesian region for a long time, on the one hand as one of the major centres of high plant diversity including the highest number of primitive angiosperms in the world and, on the other hand, as the major global divide between faunas of the Australasian and Asian regions. Originally seen as ancient patterns, related to first static and then moving continents, it is becoming increasingly clear that both tectonism and climate change have extended into and, in terms of climate, accelerated during, the Quaternary period. It has also been discovered that a component of the fauna, the genus Homo, has had a long Quaternary history in the Indonesian region and that this is important to debates over the evolution and migration patterns of people and their cultural development, as well as to considerations about the impact people might have had on other components of the ecosystems of this region. Consequently, patterns of variation and diversity must be seen in the light of Quaternary environmental change.