Hominin activities in the sub-Himalayan floodplain during the late Pliocene

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The program follows the fieldworks initiated in 2006 in these foothills by the “Society for Archaeological and Anthropological Research” in Chandigarh chaired by Mukesh Singh, and two members of UMR 7194, Anne Dambricourt Malassé and Claire Gaillard. Since 2008 choppers, fossils and traces of butchery activity (cut and percussion marks) have been collected in the silts of Masol (Dambricourt Malassé 2016, Dambricourt Malassé et al., 2016b). The program has been patronized since 2012 by Yves Coppens, Professor at the Collège de France. Ten articles dedicated to Masol's multidisciplinary study were published in a thematic issue of Palevol, the Comptes-Rendus of the Academy of Sciences, Institut de France (Coppens 2016, Dambricourt Malassé, 2016). Ten years of studies and analyses made it possible to recognize in Masol, and for the first time in the History, the oldest Pliocene human activity not only in Asia but also in the Old World.