Sad news in the world of history: Yves Coppens, who had notably discovered the skeleton of the Australopithecus Lucy, died this Wednesday at the age of 87 according to AFP. Passionate about prehistory since his childhood, this son of a nuclear physicist born in 1934 developed a passion for excavations at a very young age. “From the age of seven or eight, I wanted to become an archaeologist“, he already told AFP at the end of 2016. “All my holidays were taken up with digging“.
In 1956, he entered the CNRS at only 22 years old, and a few years later obtained his doctorate in paleontology: his career was launched! Man in the field, Yves Coppens went on an expedition to Africa from 1960 and began with Algeria and Chad. But it was in the Afar depression in Ethiopia that he made his greatest discovery in 1974: with his geologist friend Maurice Taieb, as part of an international expedition, he unearthed 52 fragments of bones.
It was at the time the most complete hominid fossil ever found, which researchers nicknamed Lucy, in reference to the Beatles song. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds they listened to while labeling the bones. This is a Australopithecus afarensis3.2 million years old that Yves Coppens presented as a very distant cousin of man, and not as his ancestor despite what we may have heard.
Archaeologist author of excavations in more than ten countries, he is co-signatory of six hominids in the world. At the same time, Yves Coppens was appointed deputy director of the Musée de l’Homme in 1969 then director of this museum in 1980. He was then elected holder of the Chair of paleoanthropology at the Collège de France in 1983, which he held until 2005. position which earned him a lot of attention from the political sphere.
In 2002, he was commissioned by Jacques Chirac to write the environmental charter subsequently included in the French constitution. In 2010, it was Nicolas Sarkozy this time who called on his services: the Lascaux cave was deteriorating, he improved the conditions and only left his post in 2017, sure that the situation was going well. meaning.
Author of memoirs recently, he confided that apart from Lucy, his real pride was to have “undeniably linked the emergence of Man to climate change“, in 1975.”The forest gave way to the savannah, Man stopped climbing trees and straightened up, his brain developed to resist carnivores“he wrote in his book in which he did not once mention his private life, which has always remained very secret.