| Summary: | Where today means yesterday: Southern Siberian Ice Age refugium. Recent evidence suggests that the closest modern analogues of the Pleistocene full-glacial ecosystems of Central Europe are not found in Northern Eurasia, but in Central Asia, namely in the Altai and Sayan Mountains of southern Siiberia. This area is a refugium for many species of plants, mammals and snails which were abundant in full-glacial Central Europe but went extinct in this region in the Holocene. Peculiar co-occurrence of tundra, steppe, forest and desert species encountered in modern ecosystems of these mountain ranges is also typical of the European Pleistocene fossil record, but does not exist in today´s Europe.
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