"This project targets the shift and variability of human adaptive systems in the scope of the dispersion of the Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHs), from the African continent to throughout Eurasia 60,000 years ago.This dispersion was accompanied by new technical, social and territorial organizations that characterize the Upper Paleolithic material culture. Much research has focused on the recent stages of these modern human populations (25,000 B.P.) of East and Central Europe.There is still little evidence on the life way of the first modern human populations and of the Early Upper Paleolithic cultures (40,000 B.P.) in western Europe (e.g. France), remaining as one of the least known periods of the European prehistory.Closely related to the spread of the AMHs in Europe is the search for the processes responsible for the emergence of cognitive “modernity"" , which is currently nourished by major discoveries in South Africa. The MSA contexts (South Africa) hold the more remarkable and oldest signs of modern behavior by humans (60,000 B.P.) and a wide range of cultural innovations that predate similar behavior only occurring in Europe with the Early Upper Paleolithic 40,000 years ago. Their study allow to provide keys of understanding of how the shift in mentality, practical skills and the emergence of figurative thinking occurred in Europe.On examining Early Upper Paleolithic (France) and Middle Stone Age (South Africa) stone tools made of a wide range of rocks trough use-wear analysis, in the scope of multidisciplinary teams, this project intends to determine against distinct environmental backdrops and cultural niches, how ecological factors (e.g. bio-geological resources availability), influenced and shaped subsistence and settlement strategies of the early modern humans. Whereas to consider that cultural drift is only driven by purely cultural mechanisms, the goal is to explore the diversity of 1st AMHs material cultures within an ecological basis."