I’ m interested in exploring and underscoring hominin behaviours in relation to food procurement strategies in the past, stone tools manufacture and the synergetic links between hominin-environmental interactions, cognition abilities and subsistence systems. Specifically, I uses phytolith analysis in combination with archaeological and plant micro-remains data in order to reflect the nature and type of environments that were occupied by early humans and the plant environments surrounding their habitats during the Pleistocene-Holocene epochs.

I conducted my MA thesis on the coservational challenges of world heritage site of konso cultural landscape which is found in the great rift valley. I presented this on the 3rd GDR colloquium.

However for in the future i have a plan to do the same assessment on the Lower Omo Valley and Lower Awash Valley archaeological and paleontological world heritage sites.

I want to inquire conservational challenges of these to site.

Lower Valley of Awash paleo-anthropological site covers 150km2 where ‘Lucy’ or “ድንቅነሽ” Australopithecus Afarensis (3.2mya) and ‘Ardi’ (4.4mya) are found. It is inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.

Lower Valley of Omo paleontological site covers 165km2 where different human and animals fossil found. The site inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.

Research themes: Late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies in Africa. I am interested in the organization of hunter-gatherer lithic technology, especially stone procurement. My research explores how technological organization can be studied to understand the major evolutionary and demographic changes of the last hundred-thousand years in Africa.

I am a prehistorian who performs archaeological research along the eastern African Rift system in order to reconstruct the dynamics of human settlement in relation to the emergence of new technical practices, new behavioural skills and related paleoenvironments, from the early hominins bearing the Oldowan culture to the early ‘Homo sapiens’ groups, authors of the Middle Stone Age, i.e. from ca. 2.3 million years to 30 thousand years before present.

My research focuses on very ancient archaeological sites (Oldowan) and aims to understand the production, function, and preservation of stone tools made by hominins living within the East African Rift. My field of research is currently located in the Lower Omo Valley (Shungura Formation) in association with members of the Omo Group Research Expedition.

My PhD research focuses on studying the trophic shifts of Plio-Pleistocene hominds using integrative approach of paleontology, zooarcheology, data analysis and modelling.

Sonia Harmand is an archaeologist and the director of the Mission Préhistorique au Kenya / West Turkana Archaeological Project in Kenya. Her research focuses on reconstructing the skills and cognition of the earliest tool-making hominins in Africa, and particularly pre-Homo species.

She is also interested in biomechanics involved in stone tool production, as well as primate archaeology.

Benoit Hazard is working on anthropo-scenes in Africa. Research are based on two ethnographic sets:

1. the invention of “modern water” in the wells system of pastoralists groups (Chalbi Desert, North Kenya);
2. the study of the socio-ecological changes due the energy transition in the Central Valley of the Kenyan Rift.