Through time, space and species: implication of new discoveries, technological developments and data diffusion improvement in biological anthropology

Anthropological sciences and particularly the study of the biological aspect of ancient populations is in a constant modernization and implementation, through the improvement, application or adaptation of methodologies/instrumentations/techniques and most of all by the discovery of new fossils. It is no coincidence that, in recent decades, technological advances in biological anthropology have allowed us to clear some aspect of human evolution and migration. In this framework, a new UISPP commission “Biological Anthropology” dedicated to the Anthropological sciences sensu lato has been created. The purpose of the commission is to bring together several researchers from different institutions, continents and specialties to give an interdisciplinary and transcontinental aspect to the dynamic context of this field of research. The first successful event organized by the commission was the UISPP session which took place during the XVIII° UISPP congress held in Paris in June 2018. This session, split in two main thematic: specific sites/human population and methodological approaches, met the commission expectations: bring together all the disciplines of anthropological sciences regardless of the position of the researcher. In this thematic volume, we propose a sample of the research items presented and discussed during the session. Being aware of the difficulty to publish original research in the field of Anthropology, authors were free to choose between a normal paper and an extended abstract. The variety of topics presented in this volume depicted the framework from how the session has been structured and the basis from which the Biological anthropology commission has been created.