Chapter 7 of Jim Valentine's classic book, Evolutionary Paleoecology of the Marine Biosphere, is titled "Community Ecology and Evolution" (Valentine 1973, 269-336). The first sixty-two pages of the chapter are about various general properties of community ecology and paleoecology, the next three and one-half pages concern the evolution of species within communities, and only the last two and on...

Although it is widely recognised that America was the last continent to be populated by our species, researchers’ views on various aspects of this process (e.g. the period in which it occurred, the area from which the colonizing populations came, the number of dispersal waves and the routes taken by these migrations) differ significantly. In this paper, we review both classical data and more re...