Far from austere scholars, the discoverer of Lucy, who disappeared on June 22, has made us all paleontologists.
Some scientists have a knack for making themselves irresistibly likeable. They recount their discoveries and one has the impression of hearing La Fontaine speak. When he described the behavior of ants, the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre thought like a scientist, expressed himself as a humanist and opened hearts like a window to the bright sun. Victor Hugo had nicknamed him the Homer of the ants. As a kid, I was fascinated when the biologist Jean Rostand was on television. There was saga in the air when he went on his frog adventures. With that, distrusting like the plague of “certain sciences having made us gods even before we deserved to be men”.
Read also: When Yves Coppens enlightened our prehistory
It is this friendly flow that Yves Coppens raised when he described our good old australopithecines. Because, with him, we went back a long way. Millions of years back. He will have really rolled up the skirts of history. At the same time, he touched on metaphysics. Between his fingers, pebbles, simple traces, seeds or bits of bone became the symbol of the birth of man. During the Renaissance, he would have ended up at the stake. In ours, he was not even admitted to the French Academy, panicked at the prospect of seeing within it a fossil specialist!
In life, the dream is to have a passion. His was born in Vannes, at his home, at Château-Gaillard, the paleontology museum of the Polymathic Society of Morbihan. It is the former parliament of Brittany from the time of the Dukes Jean. There are axes, funerary urns, ancient coins, bowls, Neolithic jewellery, biface flints… A real souk that he watched dazedly as a child. Then he went a stone’s throw away, to Carnac, to the cairn of Gavrinis, to the dolmen of Île-aux-Moines and there he continued to dream. When you make it an epic instead of a graveyard, the past looks magical. And that’s how he became France’s most famous paleontologist when he introduced us to Lucy – real scientific inventory name AL 288-1.
A small good woman: 1.10 meters high. Very old: about 3.2 million years old. Not very pretty: a too advanced muzzle and enormous teeth. But ultimately less ugly than Neanderthal with his big arches, receding chin and long legs. With that, very smart: she walked and she climbed. Settled in Ethiopia, in the Rift Valley, she immediately passed for the grandmother of humanity. A status called into question a few decades later with the discovery in Chad of Toumaï and Abel, two even more distant ancestors. But the glory of Coppens was already established and he was the first to be delighted by these new resurrections.
In this world full of ten-digit data, Coppens brought us back to a world of humanist scholars
Seeing a single tooth glistening in the blazing Afar desert sun, he then found 52 bones of Lucy (out of 206, the average human) and recreated her. The feat of a scientist who at first glance spotted a very specific cervical vertebra where you and I would have seen a pebble. The result of decades of study since his degree in natural sciences when he devoted his thesis to the teeth of Pliocene proboscideans – in French, animals with trunks 3 to 4 million years old. And the reward for endless patience: paleontological research is progressing in tiny steps. Its delays are bitter but its fruits sweet. We all want to know where we come from.
Anthropologist, paleontologist, archaeologist, prehistorian, professor, Coppens had a thousand decorations and as many strings to his bow but we only remember his charm. Her soft and deep voice put velvet in each sentence and hooked the attention like a hook. In this world full of ten-digit data, he brought us back to a universe of humanist scholars. Nothing to do with the Parisian intellectual who, perched on the discipline where he excels, holds forth on a hundred others. He loved people, always found them interesting, did not pontificate or lecture. Speaking for himself, his discoveries recalled the brotherhood of all men. We’re all Lucy’s family. Even the candidates for the Miss France competition that, with a smile on their face, he presided over in a tuxedo in 2001. I repeat: he was a simple genius. The glory of Vannes.