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The French co-discoverer of “Lucy” dies at the age of 87 – Science-Environment News – Report by AFR

French paleontologist Yves Coppens, who is credited with co-discovering the famous ‘Lucy’ fossil find, died Wednesday at the age of 87 after a long illness, his publisher said.

“France has lost one of its great men,” publisher Odile Jacob tweeted, adding that in addition to his academic skills, Coppens was “a talented novelist, storyteller and non-fiction writer.”

He was part of the team, along with Maurice Taieb and Donald Johanson, that found the most complete remains of an Australopithecus afarensis ever discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974.

The team nicknamed the 3.2-million-year-old female hominid “Lucy” after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which they heard while labeling the fossils.

Based on the large part of Lucy they found, 40 percent of her skeleton, the scientists were able to determine her height (one meter, 3.5 feet), showing that she was muscular and able to climb trees and to walk upright.

Coppens, who was born in Brittany and was the son of a nuclear physicist father, was involved in six hominid discoveries during his career.

“I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was six or seven,” Coppens told AFP in 2016. “I spent my entire vacation time digging,” he added.

Coppens was admitted to France’s prestigious CNRS science center in 1956, aged just 22.

From the 1960s he traveled to Africa, first to Algeria and Chad.

He made his first major discovery in 1967, a 2.6-million-year-old fossil in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia.

Then followed in 1974 the international expedition in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle, which should make Coppens, his friend and French compatriot Taieb and the American Donald Johanson world famous through the discovery of Lucy.

Coppens often referred to himself as one of Lucy’s “fathers” (“papas” in French).

For a long time after the find, which included 52 bone fragments, scientists believed that she was a direct ancestor of mankind.

But this claim is no longer universally believed, and Coppens, like other paleontologists, instead considered Lucy a distant cousin of humanity.

Coppens later excavated in Mauritania, the Philippines, Indonesia, Siberia, China and Mongolia.

Back home, he became the director of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris, became a professor of paleontology at the prestigious College de France, and joined the French Academy of Sciences.

He also won several awards, was an environmental advisor to the French government and wrote several books and more than a million scientific articles.

As well as discovering Lucy, Coppens once told AFP that he was particularly proud of having “made an irrefutable link between human origins and climate change”.

As forests gave way to savannas, humans stopped climbing trees, began walking upright, and had to develop their brain power to keep carnivores at bay, he said.

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