This project aims to investigate the conditions associated with the arrival of Homo sapiens and the advent of the Upper Palaeolithic in Western Europe via an approach that combines palaeoenvironmental and archaeological studies. The use of the Northern Pyrenees as a case study reflects a desire to articulate a high-resolution continental palaeoenvironmental reconstruction with one of the main European archaeological reference areas for this period, situated between circa 50- and 30 000-years BP (From Late Mousterian to Aurignacian, via the Châtelperronian and the Protoaurignacian). The objective, through concerted analyses crossing geoarchaeology (conditions of site formation), archaeology (exploitation of both mineral and animal resources), and the environmental sciences, is to test our ability to describe and finely interpret the links that prehistoric populations had with their environment, which appears to be an essential key to interpreting the behavioral evolution during this period. By elaborating a dynamic model describing the complex and multiple relations that prehistoric societies had with their environments, we will enrich two complementary scales of analysis and reflection: that of the veritable movement, i.e., migration, of populations at a macro-historical (and therefore macro-regional) scale, and that of the movement of populations within their territories, i.e., the socio-economic organization of nomadic peoples, at a palaeoethnological and near historical scale. Articulating these distinct scales of analysis is essential in order to gain critical perspective on the conditions and adaptive constraints faced by the first societies of Homo sapiens in this particular part of the world.

Hunted, eaten, used, large herbivores held a central place for the nomadic hunters-collectors of the European Paleolithic. For nearly 200,000 years, Neandertals lived in changing and varied environments, adapting to sometimes extreme conditions. This huge adaptability of human societies is directly related to the eco-ethological flexibility of their essential resources: animals, especially large and megabivorous - the "BigGame". The BigGame project aims to identify how these changes impacted the fauna consumed and used by ‘super-predator’ Neanderthal societies in the plains of Northern France. A vast archaeological and faunal corpus attests to marked ecological changes there, but the plasticity of the species and the detail of the human responses is largely unknown. BigGame aims to investigate the detail of these processes, over short and long time scales, through different specialties at the interfaces of humanities and geosciences, intending to apply a corpus of methods at the forefront of the latest advances of paleoanthropology and prehistoric archeology, where animal will be examined in the different components of its relationship with Neandertal nomadic hunters. Focusing on the period from MIS 7 to MIS 3 that has seen several glacial / interglacial cycles, and the emergence, development and disappearance of Neandertal cultures, a total of 34 archaeological sites and more than 90 sedimentary levels will be considered in our dataset. By initiating a transversality between the disciplines that deal with material aspects, societies and environmental relationship, the BigGame project intend to address a virgin area of ​​any systemic approach. BigGame is a unique opportunity to bring together recent scientific works and advanced technologies to perform a thorough in-depth investigation of human relationship with its environment. Aiming to bring new lights to the details of the 'super-predator' Neandertal behaviors for most of its chronological expansion. In such, BigGame will be the first large-scale, integrative and systemic study, encompassing different animal taxa throughout the development and disappearance of a fossil human species. The BigGame team is composed of 20 scientists from 11 French laboratories, a private entity and 4 international institutions. Based on long-standing collaborations, BigGame will allow colleagues from different institutional partners to strengthen scientific relationships while creating new research dynamics. The communication and dissemination component will set up new collaborations and student training. Communication and dissemination of the results concerns the scientific community and also the general public.

In several regions of Western Europe, the end of the Pleistocene witnessed a recomposition of biocenoses through the replacement of cold and steppe species by so-called temperate fauna. This process did not have the same rhythm, nor the same impacts, according to North-South and East-West gradients. Between 14500 and 11000 cal. BP, while the Iberian Peninsula shows by example the maintenance of a temperate biocenosis throughout the period, a recomposition occurs in particular in Atlantic France and further north, on the shores of the future English Channel, we observe a persistence of periglacial species in the beginning of the Holocene. At the same time, the technical, social and symbolic behaviors inscribed in the equipment and graphic expressions evolve. Rapid climatic and environmental changes most likely had varying impacts on the technical, economic, and graphic interaction patterns between human communities and certain elements of the environment. The TAIHA project "Le Tardiglaciaire dans l’Arc Atlantique : Interactions techniques, socio-économiques et graphiques entre communautés Humaines et Animales durant la transition Pléistocène-Holocène (14500 – 11000 cal BP) " aims to interrogate this variability of techno-economic and graphic behaviors at the interface between human and animal communities. On the scale of the Atlantic Arc, the space studied here benefits from a longitudinal and latitudinal gradient of climatic variations and biocenoses. On a macro-regional scale (comparison of four subsets: northwestern Spain, western half of France and England), the confrontation of human behaviors and other environmental data makes it possible to question spatial variations and arrhythmias that need to be interpreted in the light of more precise local records. It is at the scale of the sites that it becomes possible to apprehend more precisely the spatio-temporal dynamics of these changes. The project thus aims for the first time to decompartmentalize disciplines. For this, it will be a question of combining petro-archaeological, techno-typological and use wear studies of lithic and bone tools and hunting weapons, involved in the acquisition and transformation of animals, but also archaeozoological analyses and paleoecological analyses with the study of graphic expressions. 14C dating on species or objects targeted in a controlled stratigraphic position will make it possible to calibrate the events described in time and synchronize human occupations with the global environmental framework. The corpus is composed of nine key sites spread from England to Spain. They correspond either to open-air occupations or to caves and shelters whose archaeostratigraphic reliability is already, or will be within the framework of the project, controlled by means of taphonomic approaches. The key sites will be the subject of in-depth analyses of lithic and bone elements, but also of decorated pieces. More targeted analyses will be carried out on several sites for which work has already been carried out on certain records. Finally, other sites will be consulted in the form of diagnostics, particularly in the context of methodological and taxonomic discussions. The corpus is composed of 9 key sites spread between England and Spain which will be studied in an exhaustive way and 40 comparison sites will feed the project thanks to studies of targeted registers (lithic analysis, bone industry, fauna, mobile art...) or collective diagnoses on certain specific questions. The TAIHA project will allow the consolidation of a network of researchers already involved but never gathered around the questioning of the different modalities of Human-Environment interaction. The scientific group mainly brings together archaeologists, specialists in lithic industries, bone industry and graphic behavior. These members, who come from various institutions, will be brought together within two partners: UMR 5199 PACEA in Bordeaux and UMR 7264 CEPAM in Nice.

ARCHOR project falls within "Axe 1" of the ANR CULT. This project seeks to reconstruct the genesis of hominin technology as far back as 3 Ma and beyond. This multidisciplinary project will use the extremely rich field data collected by the West Turkana Archaeological Project in Northern Kenya, including the recent discovery (2011) of a stone tool assemblage securely dated at 3.1 Ma (LOM3), which thus represents the oldest archaeological site ever found yet. The goal is to study early hominids cognitive competence and motor skill exactly at the time of the emergence and the first evolutionary steps of a new and unique behaviour among primates: the making of stone tools. In our field of research, this behaviour developed among fossil hominids for which we cannot refer to any living example. The approach for studying the mind of these modern humans ancestors necessarily goes through a technological analysis of their lithic production, using the chaîne opératoire concept as a tool for analysis. We will also try to define what have been the environmental and paleoanthropological conditions which have favored the emergence of such a new behaviour, more than 3 Ma ago in the Turkana Basin. Thus, beyond its first goal which is to elucidate the technological steps which have led some hominids to specific evolution paths, it also contributes to illustrate the impact of global climatic changes on human evolution and to demonstrate the possible ways hominids have chosen to answer the environmental changes. As LOM3 marks the beginning of the archaeological record, some most fundamental questions must be asked anew. How, when, and why did stone tool manufacture and use originate? Did the earliest stone knapping develop naturally from pre-existing bashing behaviors or did it develop more punctually and directly to flaking for cutting edges? What were the first stone tools used for? Which species were the first stone tool makers? Over the last 15 years, new discoveries and studies have revealed unexpected hominin diversity and the complexity of their evolutionary history, during which different species coexisted at the same time in the same regions. In this context, deciphering the phylogenetic relationships between the various species that existed between 4 and 1.5 Ma, as well as assessing the mode and tempo of the emergence of the genus Homo, is challenging. How did biology, culture and environment interact? Which role did these factors and their interactions play in hominin evolutionary history? The emergence of manipulative skills is also still debated and identifying "When stone tool-making, human-like precision grip capabilities emerged" is crucial to the understanding of origins of technology and hominisation processes and one of the ARCHOR goals. The search for the emergence and evolution of the first techno-cultural assemblages and the conditions of this emergence is shared by several teams working in different parts of the world, but essentially within the Great Rift Valley in Eastern Africa. However no where else than in West Turkana there is an archaeological record having the following remarkable advantages: (1) it bears the oldest site ever found and the oldest Acheulean site (dated at 1.76 Ma); these two sites will be the terminus ante and post quem of ARCHOR project studies; (2) a large number of sites are distributed all along a sequence ranging from more than 3 Ma to 0.7 Ma; it garantees a thorough diachronical study, although in this project we will limit our time period study to its oldest part, the Oldowan; (3) it bears several Early Oldowan sites among the world oldest (at 2.3 Ma) and a large number of Oldowan sites (1.8 Ma), which guarantees a good synchronic perspective. We thus do think we have the best securely dated data record one can expect for the research domain we want to further explore.

Beyond their role in artistic creation and symbolic expression of prehistoric societies, colouring materials were involved in different kind of activities related to technical and subsistence practices. The analytical developments of recent years, founded on the combination of naturalist (geology/ petrography) and archaeometric (mineralogical and elemental analysis) approaches, have provided a better understanding of the nature of these materials and allowed to investigate their geological origin. However, the application of these studies remains rare, even if colouring materials constitute an important potential of information for the understanding of technical and cultural behaviours, and the circulation of people and materials. There are several reasons for this scarcity of applications: 1/ the lack of knowledge about the evolutionary chains, i.e. the modifications of their characteristics due to bio-geochemical, anthropic and taphonomic transformations that occur from the deposit to their discovery: these modifications of their composition constitute biases that can limit the identification of the geological and geographical origin of the colouring materials; 2/ the diversity of the analytical protocols and the heterogeneity of data produced between laboratories and research teams: these biases limit the comparison of data between studies and limit the generalisation of these approaches; 3/ the difficulty of analysing and comparing the composition of blocks of colouring matter with that of residues on the surface of archaeological remains: while the protocols for analysing cohesive blocks are efficient and hardly invasive, the analysis of residues remains difficult and the analytical techniques used on the blocks do not provide the necessary spatial resolution for analysing these thin layers; 4/ the lack of robust geological references: the establishment of geological references at a regional or supra-regional scale requires considerable investment. The geological reference collections, established independently by researchers or teams as a result of projects centred on archaeological sites, are not easily accessible and reusable, notably because of standardisation issues. The objective of the Color-Sources project is to overcome these constraints in order to provide a new dynamic to the study of the origins of prehistoric colouring materials at a national and international scale, by developing and sharing knowledges and methodologies necessary to build geological reference collections and to compare them with archaeological collections. This objective will be achieved by developing an "open science" dynamic and the production of "FAIR" (Easy to Find, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data. To this aim, Color-Sources will be supported by an interdisciplinary consortium in order a) to share the experience acquired in our various archaeological fields in order to better understand the evolutionary chains, to develop a common methodology for studying colouring materials and to implement it in a common field: the Dordogne and its periphery; b) to develop interoperable data acquisition protocols, to improve the statistical processing protocols for the data produced (particularly elementary data), and to develop an elementary analysis methodology by LA-ICP-MS/MS that could be applied to both blocks and residues of colouring materials in order to limit the biases induced by the use of several different techniques, c) to design an information system to save, reuse and disseminate the data acquired by the French community on the sources of raw colouring materials used in the Palaeolithic period.