A sediment core recovered in the central part of hemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Hulun Lake in the northeastern Inner Mongolia was analysed for pollen assemblage and a pollen-climate transfer function was developed in order to reveal the history of changes in vegetation and climate over the lake region during the Holocene. The authors suggest that temperature variations in the Hulun Lake region during the Holocene were controlled, on orbital scale, by changes in summer solar radiation in the northern Hemisphere, but could be related, on suborbital scale, to the strength of the East Asian summer monsoon. The lack of precipitation over the lake region before 8 000 cal.a B.P. would be attributed to the weakened summer monsoon resulting from the existence of remnant ice sheets in the northern Hemisphere. Changes in the monsoon precipitation on millennial-to-centennial scales would be associated with the ocean-atmosphere interacting processes occurring in the western tropical Pacific.hemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />