Three million years later, Maurice Taieb joined in the afterlife the one who made him famous, has learned 20 Minutes with the CNRS. It is to this French researcher born in Tunisia that we owe the discovery of the relatively complete skeleton of an Australopithecus 3.2 million years old.
Named Lucy, after the Beatles song that the team of researchers were listening to at the camp, this fossil extracted from the Ethiopian Rift in November 1974 revolutionized our understanding of humanity and its origins.
Lucy, the oldest and most complete remains among other hominid fossils
At the time Maurice Taieb was a researcher at the CNRS at the Luminy geology laboratory in Marseille, later integrated into the Pythéas institute. He was then emeritus research director at the European Center for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences in Aix-en-Provence.
He passed away on July 23 in Marseille at the age of 86. Lucy remains to this day the oldest and most complete skeleton among other hominid fossils since unearthed in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia. “With his dazzling smiles barred from his eternal cigarette on his lips, Maurice testified, both in the field and in the laboratory, of exceptional energy,” his colleagues testified in a press release.
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