dence comes from about 14 areas, mostly at high elevations (2000-4000 m) in the Eastern and Central Cordillera and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; some data were collected from the tropical lowlands.

Late-glacial records from Ecuador do not exhibit evidence of a climatic reversal (Hansen and Sutera, l995). Several sites in Peru give indications of a late-glacial climatic reversal although sediments from Laguna Junin indicate that the cooling occurred between 14,000-13,000 years ago, before what is normally observed for the Younger Dryas event (Hansen and Sutera, 1995). Further radiocarbon dating accompanied by high-resolution sampling is necessary. As noted above, ice cores from Peru and Bolivia show a strong late-glacial reversal (Thompson et al., 1995, 1998) that is probably correlative with the Younger Dryas, but dating is not yet unequivocal.

For several decades, southern South America has been a controversial region with respect to a possible Younger Dryas signal (Heusser, 1990; Markgraf, l991; Denton et al., 1999). Two recent studies continue the debate from different regions of southern Chile. A study in the Lake District (Moreno et al., 2001) describes three sites at which conditions approached modern climate by about 15,000 years ago followed by cooling in two steps and then by warming around 11,200 years ago in a pattern similar to that in Europe and Greenland. The rough synchronism between Northern and Southern Hemispheres argues for a common forcing or rapid transmission of a climate signal between hemispheres. In contrast, a study farther south of four lakes shows no Younger Dryas signal (Bennett et al., 2000).

Late-glacial pollen evidence from New Zealand shows no substantial reversal of the trend toward warmer conditions after deglaciation (McGlone et al., 1997; Singer et al., 1998). However, a later study (Newnham and Lowe, 2000) found an interval of cooling that began about 600 years before the Younger Dryas and lasted for about a millennium; also, as noted below, one New Zealand glacier advanced near the start of the Younger Dryas interval (Denton and Hendy, 1994; cf. Denton et al., 1999).

Data from Central Africa suggest that arid conditions characterized the Younger Dryas in both highlands and lowlands (Bonnefille et al., 1995). The research focused on a high-resolution record from Burundi and com-