An Interview with Yves Coppens
Professor with the college of France and recognized paleontologist
Talks about the Russian Almasty and Cryptozoology
for the magazine "Mystery" of November 1994.

"Yves Coppens discovered Lucy, a skeleton three million years old. An important discovery. A meeting that was to transform his life. As if Lucy had lain waiting for him all those years, a Sleeping Beauty. As if this quest for our human origins were really a love affair, and Yves Coppens a Prince Charming in the guise of a prehistorian."
.... Jaydie Putterman

INTERVIEW:

# Why did you guarantee the expedition of Marie-Jeanne Koffman?

Yves Coppens:
Because I am a scientist and that science is curious by definition and am interested I were going to say I believe but I am sure with all that is possible. That one comes to say me that it acts of myth and that one me shows it, or that it is said to me that one found the bones of the animal until I wait, I would be also happy. But in any case, I do not go into reverse, I am completely interested, and always ready to guarantee this type of step. I find that it is an extremely significant thing and that it is wise to see lighting one day, in some direction that it is.

# Is it of a monkey or a man?

Y.C.: I do not know anything of it but still do not know if they exist. According to description that me has ridge of it Doctor Koffmann, that would answer much more one large monkey that with an
old man.

# However they talk of Neanderthal man?

Y.C.: This species of obsession to call this man Neandertal is ridiculous. I am completely hostile with this idea because Neandertal is a fossil man whom one knows very well and who is only some 30 000 years old at the maximum. They are people who are very intelligent according to their tools, which are very refined, which collects curious stones, which collects fossils, which decorate the body, which believe in beyond since they bury their deaths... That does not have really anything to see with this history of AImasty.

# Why such a confusion?

Y.C.: The error comes owing to the fact that, since the last century, Neandertal is the stupid equivalent " of man and fruste ". Take the film Forrest Gump where Tom Hanks incarne simple of spirit. During an interview, the actor affirmed to have taken as a starting point Neandertal for his role of simpleton. There is no more no doubt, for the man, Cro-Magnon is idiot!

# For you the hypothesis of the monkey is not in any doubt?

Y.C: It has very to like. Initially, it has this divergent big toe, one sees it on the prints raised during forwardings, and it has nothing to do with the human foot and its toe aligned on the others,
which besides is a foot which does not have more than three million annèes. This is why it appears more obvious to to me to deal here with great primate which, obstructed by the men in low altitude, went to take refuge in the mountains.

# What is the evidence that we hold today on the existence of Almasty?

Y.C.: There are many prints of foot - photographs and mouldings - which are indeed very impressive. Doctor Koffmann also reported the description of a species of litter which would have been occupied by these animals and around which were vegetable food remainders.

# Can one know today the approximate number of Almasty populating the Caucasus?

Y.C.: I do not know anything of it. It is a little bit what throws the disorder on the reality of this character. One finds Almasty in the Caucasus, Yeti in Nepal and Bigfoot in America. I find that it much is met...

# One of your fellow-members affirms that a species can remain only in the condition which there remain at least thousand alive individuals. Would that like to say that there would be in the Caucasus, a thousand of Almasty without one being able to distinguish them?

Y.C.: Why not, and that does not appear to me much besides, because the Caucasus is an area of altitude which is extremely raised. Spaces are immense. And then the man does not have any reason to go up starting from a certain altitude in the forest belts. To drive out, it is satisfied with a not very major part of the forest. In the same way, to recover its wood, it has what is necessary for him in edge. Thus, the fact that there is a thousand of individuals does not appear
surprising whole.

# Why can't you detect the creatures with high technology of detection operated by satellite?

Y. C. In the forest, one does not see large-thing, even since the satellites. In addition, look at time sometimes that one puts to find the wreck of a plane in spite of these satellites which, it should be
said in passing, can detect objects of the size of a ball of tennis. And then, in spite of the satellites, there is many extraordinary and significant animals of size in life. I think of the pseudoryx, this animal large like a buffalo with horns of antelope African discovered lately in Vietnam. That proves that this kind of small beast exists today. They are not because people of the Caucasus live beside Almasty which they will run towards the zoologists in their saying " You know, in your inventories, it does not have yet this animal there there. "They live in balance in their environment since many years. The months, of the high mountains sufficiently thick Vietnamese not to be touched too much by the two successive wars, made fun owing to the fact that the pseudoryx appeared in our listings or not. In any case, that wants to say that animals as large as this pseudoryx survived until June 1994 without never to be indexed.

# If one accepts all the information which one recovered up to now, can one say that one has a kind of missing link here?

Y. C: It is not a link missing with respect to the man, but the phyletic tree of the species is very large. Since the number of species is extrapolated to forty or about fifty million, those which
one lays out, alive and fossil, represent of it only one part, i.e. one has many links which miss. Paleontology is much richer of these links which miss than links than it has to find. Thus, it would be indeed a link moreover, but at all related to the man.

Copyright (c) 1994 - Mystery Magazine TF1
Photograph copyright Jaydie Putterman

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