ABSTRACT
This survey of early Middle Pleistocene deposits in Europe and their strati graphical relationships seeks to emphasise certain problems, for example, the fragmentary nature and associated uncertainties of what have long been regarded as the classic sequences or even stratotypes for this period in the Netherlands and in eastern England. The potential of other sequences in Germany and Denmark has been dissipated because of a failure of multi-disciplinary collaboration or the need for re-investigation, but these can still only represent small fragments of the stratigraphical jig-saw. In eastern Europe the clear evidence for at least one major glacial event during the early Middle Pleistocene calls for reassessment of similar evidence elsewhere. Sedimentary sequences associated with the great river systems of central Russia and Belarus offer the prospect of providing a much better stratigraphical framework for this time period than is currently available. However, our most complete overviews at present, the recently amplified oxygen isotope record and the long pollen diagrams from Tenaghi Phillipon both suggest the incompleteness of our present models and the complexity of climatic oscillations over a critical period when the influence of the different Milankovich orbital frequencies was changing.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Robert Krasnenkov, who died in February 1996, and whose studies of the stratigraphy and malacology of the Upper Don Basin in Central Russia have contributed to a major reassessment of the Early and early Middle Pleistocene of eastern Europe.
