Yves Coppens, discoverer of Australopithecus Lucy, is dead

Yves Coppens, discoverer of Australopithecus Lucy, died on Wednesday June 22. In November 1974, the paleontologist brought to light, on a construction site in northern Ethiopia, the corpse of an ancestor over three million years old, who had become world famous. “Lucy is therefore a young woman of the Australopithecus group, she is not, on the zoological level, part of the men”explained Yves Coppens in 1975.

Born in Morbihan, Yves Coppens has traveled the planet to unearth the mysteries of our origins. He devoted his life to tracing the trail of the human species and telling it with his simple and captivating talent. He could thus explain his research to anyone, including children. In addition to being a man of science, the paleontologist Yves Coppens was a fervent defender of the environment and a great humanist.