Around the question

Why and how to go back to the origins of humanity?

Tribute to Yves Coppens

Audio 48:30

Cover "Origins of man, origins of a man", by Yves Coppens.

© Editions Odile Jacob

By: Caroline Lachowsky

2 mins

Let's pay tribute to Yves Coppens, the most inspired and inspiring paleoanthropologist of his generation, co-discoverer of Lucy and so many other human fossils, a formidable storyteller and brilliant transmitter of our human prehistory.

He died last Wednesday (June 22, 2022) at the age of 87, arousing the turmoil of the paleontological community around the world to whom he paved the way... 

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But also of all those (from the youngest to the oldest in this world) who had the chance to rub shoulders with him during his excavations and his research on all terrains and in particular on this African continent that he loved so much and that he has surveyed so much as he has often told us here in this studio... with each time, the same benevolent and warm enthusiasm.

We therefore invite you to listen again to the interview he gave us in January 2018 when his memoir

published .

Tribute to a man, a researcher, a remarkable smuggler:

In MEMORIAM...

“Eighty years of memories, encounters, travels, initiatives, results, successes, joys, full of small pleasures and very small misfortunes, of great dazzle.

Paleoanthropology and archeology have the scientific and philosophical duty to reconstruct the history of man;

they demonstrated that our roots were animal, proved our cousinship with the great apes, declared our unique, tropical and African origin, showed the logic of our progressive deployment throughout the world, and explained how consciousness and knowledge gradually gave this funny little mammal that we are behavioral traits that we had not yet seen emerge, along the 4 billion years of history of life, and which are free will and freedom, responsibility and dignity.

»

Rebroadcast of the program of 25/01/2018.

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