... altogether.Further east, on the Russian Plain, the dense temperate forest of the last interglacial maximum was replaced by open, harsh, loess-steppe with the onsetof the LGM (Rousseau et al., 2001) . ... taiga at the end of the last interglacial in the 135144 Neanderthals and Modern Humans The western Balkans and, in smaller measure, the Alps and the Italian moun-tains appear to have been the major ... of the middle Pleistocene (Jahns et al., 1998). The complexity of the African climate is the result of the size and heteroge-neous nature of the continent. Nevertheless links between Northern...