Les rongeurs fossiles pour étudier les paléoenvironnements pléistocènes d’Afrique australe

South Africa has one of the most complete records of fossils and archaeological artifacts documenting human origin, biological and cultural evolution. Yet, the study of human evolution implies solid knowledge of the environments in which hominins lived and the impact of climatic changes on landscape and species evolution. Among various palaeoenvironmental clues, micromammals represent one of the most reliable proxies to document past landscapes. Remains of these small animals are recovered in abundance in archaeological and palaeontological cave sites, and they have small home ranges and specic ecological requirements that make them good indicators of their environments. Micromammal fossils have been used by the end of the 20th century to deduce environmental conditions during the Pliocene and the Pleistocene in southern Africa. Since then, however, advances in various fields such as ecology, systematics, palaeontology or taphonomy have challenged many of these earlier attempts, and some methods have been revealed as misused or overly ambitious. My Ph.D project aims to address these issues by setting up a new integrative approach combining tools from traditional paleontological methods, artificial intelligence and morphofunctional analyses. This integrative approach is expected to provide solid scenarios and data to better understand the climatic, environmental, faunal and human dynamics specific to southern Africa during the Pleistocene.