Discoverer of several hominid fossils, including the famous Australopithecus Lucythe paleontologist Yves Coppens, died Wednesday at the age of 87, was keen to introduce a wide audience to the fabulous story of the origins of Man. Books, conferences, interviews, but also scientific supervision of documentaries: this formidable smuggler, professor emeritus at the College de France, has never ceased to recount with verve the human epic.
Yves Coppens went on an expedition to Africa from 1960, starting with Algeria and Chad. In 1967, he discovered a 2.6 million year old bipedal hominid fossil in the Omo River Valley (Ethiopia). But with his 1974 expedition to the Afar depression, he was to become one of the most famous faces of paleontology. With geologist Maurice Taieb and American Donald Johanson, they uncovered 52 bone fragments. It was at the time the most complete hominid fossil ever found. Researchers call her Lucy, after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by labeling the bones.
Lucy was then considered the ancestor of modern man, before research on the origins of humanity challenged this presentation. But this incredible discovery is not the one that marked Yves Coppens the most and he explained it on France Bleu Mayenne in 2018, guest of the radio class, program presented by Pascal Fouchet and by young people from Mayenne: “first because I found other things before Lucy and then I found other things after. Lucy has lost its importance over the years. Personally, the first human fossil that I I found it was in 1961 in Chad and that one marked me scientifically and emotionally. But the most important discovery of my career, we know less, is to have understood and realized that the evolution of the “Man was completely linked to the evolution of the climate. Man was born, like the animals that surrounded him, from the need to adapt to global warming. When I found this in 1975, it was absolutely not known. And then it spread and everyone believes in it today”.