This paper aims at comparing two contemporary anthropological series from the following French sites: Biache-Saint-Vaast-BSV (an open-air site in the North of France) and Payre (a rock-shelter in the Rhone valley, south of France). Both have yielded human remains from archaeological levels whose chronological attribution is around 250 ka, i.e. at the time of the emergence of the classic Neandertal form in Europe. At BSV, skull fragments from 2 individuals and 11 maxillary teeth from a single individual were discovered. At Payre, 2 parietal fragments probably from the same individual, 10 lower & 3 upper teeth and 2 fragmentary mandibles were unearthed. We have concentrated on the study of teeth, the most abundant and least studied material to date. Only UP3 and UM2 are represented at both sites, enabling direct comparisons. 2 Material: the comparative sample consists of teeth (N > 200 in total) from Middle Pleistocene populations, Neandertals and Homo sapiens (see Martín-Francés et al. 2022). High-resolution μCT scanning of the fossil and modern material was performed at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, France (AST-RX Platform) and at CENIEH, Spain. Methods: 3D virtual segmentation of the dental tissues (enamel, dentine and pulp) was performed in Amira (6.3.0, FEI Inc.); Metric analyses comprised mesio-distal (MD) and buccolingual (BL) diameters, crown index (CI) and total computed crown base area (TCBA); For the characterisation of the enamel (OES) morphological traits we employed the modified version of the ASUDAS (Turner et al. 1991) by Martinón-Torres et al. (2012). For the Geometric morphometric (GM) analyses of the EDJ of the premolars, we placed one landmark on each of the dentine horn tips (protocone/-id and metacone/-id) and 49 semilandmarks along the marginal ridges. We performed weighted betweengroup principal component analysis (bgPCA).