The Earth has experienced repeated ‘ice-ages’, when glaciers extended over the continents and sea-levels dropped, changing the configuration of land and sea. The most recent ice-age saw the emergence of our own species, and a host of wonderful animals roamed the land. This ice-age has been an important focus of historical explanation for the origins of our modern landscapes, vegetation, and distribution of flora and fauna.

But there is much more to ice-ages than historical story-telling. Events at any period in Earth history are controlled by processes operating on a variety of time-scales, continuously from those we can see and experience directly up to the age of the Earth itself. But this range of time-scales has become divided by different academic traditions. Ecologists deal with processes operating on human time-scales and work with modern species, Quaternary palaeoecologists work with the fossil record of the same species during the period of the most recent ice-ages, and palaeontologists (mostly) occupy the rest of geological time. That is the theory. In practice, there is some dialogue between ecologists and palaeontologists, perhaps through the continuing influence of On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859), but Quaternary palaeoecology receives barely token attention from either group. For example, a recent prominent symposium volume on Perspectives in Ecological Theory includes an ‘Ecology and Evolution’ section, with papers on population genetics, palaeontology, and a discussion of them (Feldman 1989; Stanley 1989; Travis & Mueller 1989).