International audience The Horn of Africa is particularly important for understanding human and faunal migration events through the Strait of Bab el Mandeb or along the Red Sea. At the end of the Pleistocene, the Middle / Later Stone Age (MSA / LSA) transition represents a key step in human (cultural) evolution; however, this transition and its environmental context remain poorly understood in this area. Unfortunately, Late Quaternary stratified archaeological sites in this region are rare and poorly documented, which prevents exploration of this question. The Buticha Cave, or ‘Goda Buticha’, located in eastern Ethiopia and dated from ca. 45 ka cal BP to ca. 4000 cal BP, brings new insights to this issue. The lithic assemblage shows relative continuity between MSA to LSA industries in the sequence. In order to understand the environmental conditionsthat prevailed during the accumulation of the cave deposits, analysis of the micromammal remains was undertaken, because small animals like rodents are well-known as good palaeoecological indicators. The micromammal remains appear to have been accumulated by opportunistic owls, such as eagle-owl, which allows reliable paleoenvironmental reconstructions. In the preliminary study, 17 different rodent taxa were identified at Goda Buticha, representing almost 50 % of the total current rodent diversity for the whole country, as well as one species no longer occurring in Ethiopia today. While the taphonomic signal is similar throughout the sequence, the paleoecological analysis showed environmental change through time: the open-dry landscape characterizing the Late Pleistocene became gradually wetter and more wooded during the Holocene. These results are in agreement with paleoenvironmental data from large mammals and speleothems, as well as geochemical, physical and biological analyses of the sediments from Ethiopian lakebasins, which provide high-resolution reconstructions of the climate variability in the region since 45 ka. These records enhance our regional understanding of cultural change or continuity in eastern Africa from the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene.