Topic summary
Near Oceania
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Near Oceania and Remote Oceania.
Near Oceania
When the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored Nusantara, he drew attention to fundamental biological differences between the Australia-New Guinea region and Southeast Asia. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name of Wallacea, in honor of the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection. Wallace speculated that the key to understanding these differences would lie in "now-submerged lands, uniting islands to continents" (1895).