PARIS - FRENCH anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who helped shape Western thinking about human civilisation, has died at the age of 100, his publisher and colleagues said on Tuesday.

Levi-Strauss died on Friday and was buried at a private service in the Burgundy village of Lignerolles, where he had a house, senior colleagues said.

'Two years ago he broke his hip and he had been very tired ever since. He died at a grand old age,' said Philippe Desacola, his successor as head of the social anthropology laboratory at the College of France research institute. A family friend said relatives chose to wait before announcing his death to protect their privacy and avoid a media storm at his funeral.

Trained as a philosopher, Levi-Strauss shot to prominence with his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane), a haunting account of travels and studies in the Amazon basin and one of the 20th century's major works.

Paying tribute, President Nicolas Sarkozy gave 'homage to a tireless humanist, a curious academic who was always in search of new knowledge, to a man free of any sectarianism or indoctrination'.

The French leader described him as a 'very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology and raised the reputation of French human and social sciences to its highest level'. -- AFP