Living in the last high glacial — an interdisciplinary challenge

This chapter contains a personal view of the scientific potential and the feasibility of an interdisciplinary study of the global distribution of the Late Palaeolithic in its environmental setting. It is an assessment of the kind of information that is available or may be reasonably obtained for palaeo-environments of the inhabited continents around 18000 years ago. It also examines the relevance of those data for a study of global human settlement patterns during the last high glacial and discusses the limitations of such data as well as the difficulties likely to be encountered in the reconstruction of regional palaeoenvironments at 18000 BP. It is not a preliminary description and analysis of those environments, nor does the bibliography exceed an introductory minimum. If the reader should be inclined to regard the following pages as excessively optimistic, I point to the remarkable successes of such recent undertakings as CLIMAP in reconstructing global Ice-Age environments to a detail and degree of quantification thought impossible as recently as the 1960s.