Yves Coppens, one of the discoverers of the most famous fossil in the world, dies

In 1974, Yves Coppens and other collaborators discovered what is probably the most famous fossil in the world.

The French paleontologist, who has just died after 87 years of life, was then working in the Ethiopian region of Afar, on an expedition organized by Louis Leakey at the request of Emperor Haile Selassie.

In the middle of a desert that long ago covered a lake, the 52 bones of

were found , a female of about 20 years who already walked upright more than three million years ago.

That finding offered unprecedented information about what happened between the present and the time when the lineage of chimpanzees and humans separated, just over four million years ago, and how we began to walk on our feet.

Coppens used to say that, in addition to its scientific value, that complete fossil, which one could imagine walking and climbing trees in the recent savannah, allowed the public to get closer to that remote grandmother.

In addition, she was lucky enough to have an ingenious christening.

In the middle of the celebration for the discovery of her,

, by the Beatles, was played, and Pamela Alderman, girlfriend of the leader of the expedition, Donald Johanson, proposed that they call her

.

She has known her like this ever since.

Coppens discovered in 1961, at a site in Chad, his first hominid and the one that made him known:

.

Later, in addition to other remains of human ancestors, he suggested influential theories about the ecological changes that allowed the appearance of our species.

An intense climate change three million years ago, and the tectonic movements that created the Rift Valley, created the right conditions for humanization.

The drier environment, in East Africa, would have reduced the number of trees, making it more interesting to walk on foot, or at least, as it did with

, combine it with life in the trees.

The transformation also reduced the available vegetables and pushed those protohumans to eat more meat.

This food provided the necessary energy to make possible the appearance of a great brain.

Coppens, aware of the importance of names in paleoanthropology, called his hypothesis the “East side story”;

in the west of the continent, more humid and forested, evolution continued its course to give rise to the chimpanzee.

#Yves Coppens nous a quittés ce matin.

Ma tristesse est immense.

Yves Coppens is a très grand savant, world-renowned paleontologist, member of unmentionable foreign institutions, most surtout professor at the Collège de France and member of the Académie des sciences.

– Odile Jacob (@EditriceOJacob) June 22, 2022

Coppens was born in 1934 in Vannes, the son of a physicist and a pianist.

There, in French Brittany, he nurtured his passion for archaeology.

In that region, according to him in an interview on

, fossils are old and abundant and it is easy to find megalithic structures or lines of menhirs.

All this fueled his interest in reconstructing a deep past, in which he could reconstruct the history that separated us from the animal world, unearthing fossils millions of years old.

“Our history begins in the hip, because it is the key element [to walk upright]”, he said about the key to our origin.

“Yves Coppens has left us this morning.

My sadness is immense.

Yves Coppens was a great scholar, a world-renowned paleontologist, a member of countless foreign institutions, but, above all, a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Academy of Sciences,” its editor, Odile Jacob, wrote on Twitter today.

“His kindness, his kindness, his humor, his faithfulness, his erudition were matched only by his talent as a writer.

[...] France loses one of its great men”, he concluded.

In his publishing house you can find 17 books published by Coppens, one of the most relevant scholars of human evolution of the last century.

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