Lucy’s father is no more. The eminent French paleontologist Yves Coppens died on June 22, 2022 at the age of 87. We owe him, with the American Donald Joganson and the Frenchman Maurice Taieb, the discovery in 1974 of the fossil of Australopithecus Lucy in Ethiopia.
The story went around the world: on November 30, 1974, in Hadar, in the lower Awash Valley, in Ethiopia, the international team of researchers co-directed by Yves Coppens discovered a complete Australopithecus fossil at 40%.
Arboreal and bipedal, its 3.2 million years make it the oldest fossil ever discovered at the time. In homage to the famous Beatles song, which punctuates the team’s research, he is nicknamed Lucy. Better than AL-288, its first name. Films, books, shows take over the discovery, and Lucy and her discoverer become famous.
But the career of Yves Coppens neither begins nor stops with this fundamental discovery for paleontology. It is measured in kilos, even in tons of exhumed fossils, whether they are those of mammoths or hominids.
From Brittany to Ethiopia, via Siberia
Born in Vannes in 1934, this son of a professor of nuclear physics and a pianist took an early interest in the mysteries of prehistory and archeology. The proximity of the archaeological site of Carnac, where row after row of menhirs and megaliths are exposed, fascinates the young Breton.
At barely 10 years old, just after the war, he joined a learned society of archeology, and began what would remain the passion of his life: excavations and prospecting. He will say it himself, in a book published in 2020, The Scientist, the Fossil and the Princefrom the lab to the palaces: “ We can say that my journey is a prolonged childhood, which was not upset. »
A fluid and fast course, which ticks all the stages of the cursus honorum of French scientific research. After a baccalaureate in experimental sciences at Vannes and a license in natural sciences at the University of Rennes, followed by a doctorate at the Sorbonne, he joined the CNRS at the age of 22 as a research associate. No glory in this faultless course, he tempers with humor: at the time, ” the CNRS was recruiting “.
At the National Museum of Natural History, the paleontologist René Lavocat asked him in 1959 to determine the teeth of proboscians, the prehistoric elephants on which his thesis is based. They come from fossils discovered by geologists in Africa. The young Coppens bites the bait of what he will call his ” exotic», and joined them there in January 1960.
In an Africa in the midst of a struggle for independence, he sets up expeditions and searches the soils of different countries. Chad, Ethiopia, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Indonesia, Philippines, Mongolia Siberia… These trips led him to take an interest in hominids, our ancient “parents”, and to stay away from elephants for a while.
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A “scholar in the city”
While Lucy is the most famous, the researcher dates his greatest discovery to 1975, when he associated environmental change with the birth of humans. Indefatigably curious, he developed theories throughout his career, even if it meant sometimes making mistakes and admitting his mistakes. He thus admits in 2014 that Homo Sapiens did indeed come out of Africa around 100,000 years ago, and that he was not born “everywhere else“.
Ambitious research and academic successes in shambles – he is a member of 11 academies, including the prestigious Academy of Sciences – which do not cut him off from the world and its news. Yves Coppens appreciates the figure of the “scholar in the city», and thus chairs in 2002, at the request of Jacques Chirac, the preparatory commission for the Environmental Charter, which will serve as a basis for the Grenelle and the COP21.
Mischievous, he will offer this president with whom he gets on well, while “now some distance“, a tuft of mammoth hair, 20,000 years old.
tireless popularizer
He is also a researcher who likes to transmit, beyond the benches of the Musée de l’Homme, of which he was appointed director in 1980, or those of the Collège de France, where he runs the chair of paleo-anthropology from 1983.
Coppens draws lessons for the present from his research on prehistory. Of the approximately 600 radio chronicles he produced for France Info, he wrote three books for the general public, entitled “The present of the past“. “I like to keep myself up to datehe explained from the Paris Book Fair in 2014, surrounded by his books displaying different profiles of Australopithecines.I like to insert myself into a much broader perspective, so that the public can grasp the interest[de mes recherches]and their limits.»
A taste for popularization and sharing, which this science smuggler cultivates in many ways. “I like people“, he says on many occasions. “I respect humanity, I respect humans, and I am respectful of all beliefs…”.
Humanist and optimist
As a good paleontologist, he asserts that this humanity is unique and has a common origin: “There are no white people, only discolored people!“, he had fun repeating. “We all come from the same species, born in the tropical African forests…“. The human thus incarnates above all for him “the most complicated state of matterknown to date.
An openness to the world under the sign of science, which pushes him to remain optimistic, even faced with the prospect of climate change. ” Lthe future has always worried everyone“, thus relativized the one who spoke out against cremation, so as not to “destroy the working tool of future paleontologists“. He has also promised to bequeath his skeleton to the Musée de l’Homme.
Coppens still expresses his taste for life and research in the message he leaves to future generations: “Don’t be afraid of the future. Tomorrow will be great! Live your passions. Be reasoned, but above all not reasonable. And if you want to do research, if you want a happy life, go for it.»