Wallacean mammalogy and zooarchaeology
Abstract
[Excerpt from foreword] The richness of life is not distributed haphazardly across the globe, but instead exhibits profound, non-random patterns. Numbers of species of insects, trees, and frogs, for example, abound in tropical localities, like in Brazil or the Congo, but not in Siberia or the Yukon. Species uniqueness, or endemism, peaks on large, long-isolated islands, like Madagascar or the Philippines. And different continents often have profoundly different assemblages of organisms. These types of observations regarding major patterns in the distribution of life, and their implied histories, formed the original foundation of the science of biogeography. Among the most important developers of this science was Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the architects of evolutionary biology.
One of Wallace’s many fundamental biogeographic insights was the realization that the fauna of the “Malay Archipelago”, extending from the Malay Peninsula to New Guinea, much of which is now encompassed within the modern nation of Indonesia, can be demarcated into zones of marked Asian and Australian character. (This was an insight based on firsthand fieldwork, collecting biological specimens for museums.) These zones of regional influence merge and meld along the island chain, but nevertheless a particularly sharp demarcation runs between the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi in the north, and Bali and Lombok, in the south. This demarcation is now known as the “Wallace Line” (Wallace, 1869, 1876; Fig. 1), and others later built on these Wallacean insights to identify additional “lines” of biogeographic significance in the archipelago (Fig. 1). …
