As the driver of global atmospheric and ocean circulation, the tropics play a central role in understanding past and future climate change. Both global climate simulations and worldwide ocean temperature reconstructions indicate that the cooling in the tropics during the last cold period, which began about 115,000 years ago, was much weaker than in the temperate zone and the polar regions. The extent to which this general statement also applies to the tropical high mountains of Eastern Africa and elsewhere is, however, doubted on the basis of palaeoclimatic, geological and ecological studies at high elevations.