The Ice Age (Quaternary) is a period of extreme climate fluctuations that led to the growth and melting of massive ice sheets in the high latitudes. Tropical deserts, savannas, rainforests, and mountainous regions experienced equally dramatic climatic changes, the traces of which have been preserved in sedimentary deposits. Knowledge of tropical climate history is of paramount importance because in the tropics and marginal tropics, natural and - more recently - human-induced processes significantly control global climate. Yet relatively few palaeoclimate records are known from these...