The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 806 „Our Way to Europe - Culture-Environment Interaction and Human Mobility in the Late Quaternary“ was first established in 2009 and became extended by another four years in 2013. The CRC is devoted to the history of mankind and the related natural environment since anatomically modern humans expanded from Africa to Europe. The CRC 806 combines geoscientific and archaeological methods to decipher ancient contexts of climate, natural environment and culture of the last 190,000 years with a major perspective on dispersal and retreat of human populations. 

In the second CRC phase (2013-2017), 30 Principal Investigators from the geosciences and the humanities at the Universities of Cologne, Bonn and Aachen run 22 projects, assembled into six “research clusters” (see figure). In continuation of the first CRC stage (2009-2012), four research clusters (A, B, C, D) focus on regional investigations and two research clusters (E, F) are dedicated to supra-regional topics. A seventh cluster (Z) provides central services of the CRC, including an Integrated Research Training Group (IRTG) for the PhD students.