Pierre Antoine

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Laboratoire de géographie physique, UMR 8591 CNRS Université Paris 1

Current data seem to suggest that the earliest hominins only occupied the Northwest of Europe during favourable climatic periods, and left the area when the climate was too cold and dry, in the same way as Neandertal and even Homo sapiens. However, several sites in England and the North of France indicate that the earliest hominins, possibly Homo a...

Dans le bassin de la Somme, les importants dépôts tourbeux des fonds de vallée suscitent l'intérêt des archéologues et géolo-gues depuis plus de cent cinquante ans. Que ce soit pour la richesse des traces du passé conservées ou pour la compréhension des processus de formation, les hypothèses sur les conditions environnementales de développement des...

The aim of this study is to check the validity of luminescence ages obtained from last glacial–interglacial Polish loess palaeosol sequences (LPSs) by several established current protocols, with respect to sound geomorphological and chronostratigraphic interpretations. We report 38 new optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages from fine-grained...

Palaeolithic sites associated with the Eemian Interglacial (MIS 5e) are very rare in NW Europe, and especially in Northern France, where their preservation is restricted to very specific geological contexts, in association with carbonated tufa (Caours) or peat deposits (Waziers). In order to check the reliability of ESR/U-series method to date teet...

Dans le bassin de la Somme, les importants dépôts tourbeux des fonds de vallée suscitent l’intérêt des archéologues et géologues depuis plus de cent cinquante ans. Que ce soit pour la richesse des traces du passé conservées ou pour la compréhension des processus de formation, les hypothèses sur les conditions environnementales de développement des...

Although the Somme valley (Northern France) is well known for its quaternary alluvial terraces system and the precision of its chronostratigraphic and chronocultural framework, its valley floor sequences are much less known. The research potential on the peaty valley bottoms of the Somme and its tributaries is still very important beyond the work c...

Mirak is a Palaeolithic site in Iran comprising several localities ("mounds") scattered over a dry floodplain environment extending from the southern foothills of the Alborz Mountains to the northern edge of the Central Desert in the Semnan area. The area has been studied since 2015 by an Iranian-French archaeological mission. The archaeological ex...

Mainland France is part of a plate interior with a strong structural heritage, undergoing a low rate of deformation, where destructive earthquakes can nevertheless occur. In this paper, we emphasize that the knowledge of active faults is still largely fragmentary, and that significant efforts are needed to generate robust data, in particular on the...

During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a very cold and dry period around 26.5–19 kyr BP, permafrost was widespread across Europe. In this work, we explore the possible benefit of using regional climate model data to improve the permafrost representation in France, decipher how the atmospheric circulation affects the permafrost boundaries in the mod...

North‐West Europe yields few traces of early human occupation, in particular for the Acheulean. In this context, the Somme Valley in northern France offers a route to Britain during various Pleistocene low sea levels, and has provided numerous evidence of Lower Palaeolithic human occupation through fieldwork initiated during the 19th century. These...

Résumé Les gisements paléolithiques associés aux formations fluviatiles fossiles de la Somme à Abbeville ont joué un rôle considérable dans la reconnaissance de l’ancienneté de l’Homme. Dès la fin du XVIIIe siècle, les travaux menés notamment par la Société d’émulation d’Abbeville furent à l’origine de l’émergence d’études dans la vallée de la Somm...

Résumé De nouvelles prospections ont été entreprises à Abbeville en 2016 et 2017 à l’emplacement de l’ancien site du Moulin Quignon exploité de 1837 à 1868 par Boucher de Perthes, relocalisé grâce aux travaux archivistiques menés par des chercheurs du MNHN. Ces recherches ont conduit 150 ans plus tard à la redécouverte de ce site paléolithique embl...

During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a very cold and dry period around 26.5 to 19 thousand years ago, permafrost was widespread across Europe. In this work, we evaluate the potential of regional climate model simulations to reconstruct the permafrost distribution in western Europe during the LGM. With this aim, criteria for possible thermal contr...

Terrestrial climate archives like loess-paleosol sequences (LPSs) located in Eastern Europe are known to cover long periods of time and record climate fluctuations over the last hundreds of thousands of years (e.g. 1). Glacial cold and dry conditions, leading to loess accumulation, alternate with interglacial, warm and humid episodes, leading to th...

The Amiens‐Renancourt 1 site recently yielded one of the most important Upper Palaeolithic human occupations of northern France by the number of flint artefacts and especially by the presence of Venus figurines. All the material comes from a single archaeological layer located in a tundra gley bracketed by loess units. A multi‐proxy study combining...

This study presents an overview of Middle Pleistocene loess–palaeosol sequences (LPS) in northern France and discusses the palaeoclimatic significance of the pedosedimentary record in the context of western European LPS and of global climatic cycles for the last 750 ka. In this area, the oldest loess deposits (early Middle Pleistocene) are preserve...

Our study focuses on European loess sequences, particularly the eolian intervals in between the observed pedogenic units. The classical concept of soil formation from parent material is reformulated to estimate of the duration and the associated sedimentation rate (SR) and mass accumulation rate (MAR) of these paleodust intervals. We show that the...

Paleoenvironmental reconstructions on a (supra-)regional scale have gained attention in Quaternary sciences during the last decades. In terrestrial realms, loess deposits and especially intercalations of loess and buried soils, so called loess-paleosol sequences (LPS) are important archives to unravel the terrestrial response to e.g. climatic fluct...

In northwestern Europe, continental records of Pleistocene interglacials are well preserved in fluvial sequences and particularly within calcareous tufas that formed at the top of the series. They are the sole deposits recording the full optima. Tufas contain rich malacological communities that allow the detailed palaeoenvironmental history of past...

The Tunka Basin is a broad, emerging basin situated between the Baikal Lake to the east and the the Hövsgöl Lake to the west. The basin is bounded to the north and to the south by the Tunka and the Khamar-Daban mountain ranges, respectively. The Tunka normal fault, located at the southern foothills of the Tunka mountain range, is the main structure...

Abstract The long Grâce-Autoroute section, studied in 1994 during the excavation of the A-16 Paris-Amiens-Boulogne motorway trench, overlies an alluvial formation representing the oldest term of the Quaternary stepped terrace system of the River Somme valley (Alluvial Formation X or Grâce-Autoroute, relative altitude: + 55m). This fluvial formatio...

The global character of the millennial-scale climate variability associated with the Dansgaard–Oeschger (DO) events in Greenland has been well-established for the last glacial cycle. Mainly due to the sparsity of reliable data, however, the spatial coherence of corresponding variability during the penultimate cycle is less clear. New investigations...

Résumé Le site acheuléen de plein-air de Revelles a été découvert en contexte de doline à l’occasion des travaux en 2002 de l’A29 à l’Ouest d’Amiens (Somme). Une unique occupation, dépourvue de faune, mais constituée de plus de 5000 artefacts, est attribuée au SIM 8. Cette occupation, très originale, nous permet de décrypter des caractéristiques ty...

The global character of the millennial-scale climate variability associated with the Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events in Greenland has been well-established for the last glacial cycle. Mainly due to the sparsity of reliable data, however, the spatial coherence of corresponding variability during the penultimate cycle is less clear. New investigations...

the dispersal of hominin groups with an Acheulian technology and associated bifacial tools into northern latitudes is central to the debate over the timing of the oldest human occupation of europe. new evidence resulting from the rediscovery and the dating of the historic site of Moulin Quignon demonstrates that the first Acheulian occupation north...

While numerous high-resolution studies concerning Last Glacial aeolian sequences are available for Europe, the approach of the penultimate glacial in this geographical area is still poorly developed. In order to bridge this gap, this study focuses on the Bulgarian sequence of Harletz, along the Danube River, where extremely high sedimentation rates...

The Harletz loess‐palaeosol sequence is located in northwestern Bulgaria and represents an important link between well‐studied loess sequences in eastern Romania and further sites to the west of the Carpathians (e.g. Serbia and Hungary). The aim of this study was to establish a chronostratigraphy of the deposits, using various methods of luminescen...

In this study, we describe a new Middle Pleistocene loess-palaeosol sequence uncovered during a preventive excavation at Étricourt-Manancourt (Somme, France; ig. 1). The full 12-m-thick sequence exhibits ive stacked glacial-interglacial cycles and integrates ive in situ Palaeolithic levels and remarkably one Acheulean level dated by TL on burned li...

High concentrations of calcite fossil granules produced by earthworms (ECG) have been identified in most of the stratigraphical units along the loess-palaeosol reference sequence of Nussloch (Germany). They are particularly abundant in interstadial brown soils and in tundra gley horizons, the latter reflecting short-term phases of aggradation then...

Le quartier de Renancourt, situé à l'ouest de la ville d'Amiens, est connu dans la littérature archéologique depuis le début du xx e siècle par les travaux de V. Commont menés dans « l'ancienne briqueterie Devalois ». Jusqu'à une date récente, ce gisement de plein air est resté l'un des rares témoignages du Paléolithique supérieur ancien pour l'ens...

Quantification of paleoprecipitation during the Last Glacial is a key element to reconstruct palae- oclimates. Recently, fossil calcite granules have been identified in loess sequences with high contents in specific horizons. In this study, we explored for the first time the potential of this new bio-indicator as a climatic proxy for precipitation...

Europe has been strongly impacted by the millennial climate changes related to variations in the sea-ice extent and therefore also affected the moisture sources of precipitation on the Greenland ice sheet. These variations in the extent of the sea ice during the last climatic cycle (LCC, about 130-15 kyr) impacted the westerlies and the position of...

The loess of Europe is mostly an eolian sediment, generally presenting elements of both local and global origin. It is indicative of periglacial environmental conditions, which made the fine material available to wind transport, originating mainly from sandurs or dried-out braided rivers, moraines, or dried-out shelves. Considering their distributi...

Although long loess sequences are widely recognised as providing some of the best potential records of terrestrial past climates, until recently methods for providing quantitative palaeoclimatic data have been lacking. Here we present details of an innovative new approach to reconstructing past temperature and precipitation in loess sediments. We a...

A georeferenced database is used to analyse the distribution of Quaternary soft-sediment deformation structures across France. They include features visible in aerial photographs (soil stripes and cells) and features described in cross-section (involutions). Overall, there is no clear relation between the distribution of features and the locations...

Since their discovery, the abrupt climate changes that punctuated the last glacial period (∼110.6–14.62 ka) have attracted considerable attention. Originating in the North-Atlantic area, these abrupt changes have been recorded in ice, marine and terrestrial records all over the world, but especially in the Northern Hemisphere, with various environm...

In connection with the future Seine-North Europe Canal (Seine-Scheldt), a large-scale rescue archaeological survey was conducted at Havrincourt (northern France) between 2008 and 2011. The discovery of several levels of Palaeolithic flint artefacts embedded in a relatively thick loess sequence (ca 6–7 m) preserved on a gentle slope facing North-Eas...

The characterization of Last Glacial millennial-Timescale warming phases, known as interstadials or Dansgaard-Oeschger events, requires precise chronologies for the study of paleoclimate records. On the European continent, such chronologies are only available for several Last Glacial pollen and rare speleothem archives principally located in the Me...

The characterization of Last Glacial millennial-timescale warming phases, known as interstadials or Dansgaard-Oeschger events, requires precise chronologies for the study of paleoclimate records. On the European continent, such chronologies are only available for several Last Glacial pollen and rare speleothem archives principally located in the Me...

Calcareous tufa are key-deposits for palaeoclimatic reconstructions of interglacials, since they are characteristic of temperate periods and result of calcite precipitation from meteogene water. At decade scale sampling resolution, variations in the δ18O of tufa calcite record variations in the δ18O of regional rainfalls, depending on source or amo...

Fluvial sedimentary archives are important repositories for Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts throughout the 'Old World', especially in Europe, where the beginning of their study coincided with the realisation that early humans were of great antiquity. Now that many river terrace sequences can be reliably dated and correlated with the globall...

Recently, fossil calcite granules have been found in loess sequences, in large amount in tundra gley horizons and in palaeosols. These granules, composed of rhomboedric calcite crystals and organized in a radial crystalline structure are produced by earthworms that released them in the first upper centimeters of the soil. Oxygen isotope composition...

A database of Pleistocene periglacial features in France has been compiled from a review of academic literature and reports of rescue archaeology, the analysis of aerial photographs and new field surveys. Polygons, soil stripes, ice-wedge pseudomorphs, sand wedges and composite wedge pseudomorphs are included in the database together with their geo...

Les tufs calcaires sont des formations carbonatées se déposant à proximité des sources ou en marge des rivières et des lacs. Ils sont composés en majorité de calcite (parfois plus de 95% de CaCO3) résultant de processus de dissolution dans l’aquifère puis de reprécipitation à l’air libre et à température ambiante. Ces processus nécessitant des cond...

Dating the earliest human occupations in Western Europe and reconstructing links with climatic and environmental constraints is a central issue in Quaternary studies. Amongst the discovery of Palaeolithic artefacts ascribed to the Early Pleistocene in southeast Britain and central France the Somme Basin, where the Acheulean type-site Amiens Saint-A...

Le contexte géologique des découvertes effectuées par Boucher de Perthes à Moulin Quignon en 1863–1864 a été examiné à travers les témoignages laissés par ce dernier, par ses détracteurs, puis par les géologues et archéologues ayant par la suite travaillé sur les alluvions fossiles de la Somme à Abbeville. Cette approche critique a pu être complété...

La collection de Moulin Quignon est une collection cohérente, malgré la diversité de ses pièces, dans la certitude de sa provenance et dans son rattachement aux recherches menées sur le site en 1863–1864. Considérée comme historique et patrimoniale, son étude a permis néanmoins de livrer des informations scientifiques importantes et valables pour l...

Calcareous tufa geochemical content has been recently proven to provide reliable reconstructions of climate variations during Pleistocene interglacials. As one of the best documented, the Last Interglacial (also known as the Eemian in continental area or the MIS 5e in marine records) has been frequently refer as an analogue to Holocene and future c...