The Javan faunal province lies in one of the world's most interesting zoogeographical areas, the malay-Indonesia archipelago, an arc of some 17,000 islands straddling the equator and extending for five thousand kilometers between mainland Asia and the continent of Australia.
The archipelago can be divided into three distinct faunal sub-regions: the Australo-Papuan subregion which consists of all those islands which lie on the Sahul or Australian continental plate such as Aru, New Guinea and New Brittain: the sundaic sub-region which includes all those islands which lie on the Sunda or Asiatic continental shelf such as Borneo, Sumatra and Java plus the Malay Peninsula-which although not an island is faunistically more similar to the othe Sundaic areas than to the rest of the Asian mainland; and finally the Wallacean sub-region which consists of all the islands that lie between the two continental shelves such as Sulawesi, the Moluccas and the Lesser Sunda Islands. During the ice ages of the Pleistocene era between 3 million and 8,000 years ago the sea levels were lowered by as much as a hundred meters and all the islands on the Sunda shelf were linked by hand both to each other and to the mainland of Asia. Similarly the islands on the Sahul shelf wre linked to Australia. The islands of Wallcea, however were not linked to either continent, even at the times of lowest sealevel.