Collected in this volume are the lectures Yves Coppens delivered at the Collège de France, from 1983 to 2005. A brilliant survey of the scientific work of France's greatest living palaeontologist, these lectures will enable a large public to acquire a complete overview of prehistory and of human palaeontology, and to follow the extraordinary development of the discipline from the early 1980s.

This is a major work to help us understand who we are and where we came from.

Yves Coppens is an honorary professor at the Collège de France and a member of both the French Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He is the author of, most notably, the best-selling Le Genou de Lucy.