Yves Coppens


Yves Coppens is a Breton anthropologist and co-discoverer of the fossil known as "Lucy". A graduate from the University of Rennes and Sorbonne, he has studied ancient hominids and has had multiple published works on this topic, and has also produced a film. On Saturday, 18 October 2014, Professor Coppens was named an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis.

Scientific work

Coppens is one of the co-discoverers of Lucy along with Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb.
He is currently Professor at the College de France, which is considered to be France's most prestigious research establishment.
Richard Dawkins makes the following observation in The Ancestor's Tale: "Incidentally, I don't know what to make of the fact that in his native France, Yves Coppens is widely cited as the discoverer of Lucy, even as the 'father' of Lucy. In the English-speaking world, this important discovery is universally attributed to Donald Johanson". This confusion is because Coppens was the former director of the Hadar expedition. Donald Johanson, who lead the 1974 expedition, was the one who found Lucy. The "Rift Valley theory", proposed and supported by the Dutch primatologist Adriaan Kortlandt, became better known when it was later espoused and renamed by Coppens as the "East Side Story". However, this paradigm has been challenged by the discovery of Australopithecus bahrelghazali and Sahelanthropus tchadensis by Michel Brunet's team in Toumaï in Chad.

Academies

Yves Coppens is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Medicine, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of Vatican, the French Outremer Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the Royal Academy of Sciences Hassan II of Morocco, the African Academy of Sciences, Arts, Cultures and Diasporas of Côte d'Ivoire, Honorary Member of the São Paulo Academy of Medicine, Associate Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, correspondent of the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine, honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, foreign associate of the Royal Society of South Africa.

Awards

Yves Coppens chaired the commission which wrote the French Charter for the Environment of 2004, now part of the French Constitution.