In 1993, Gibert began to think about holding a scientific conference in Orce in 1995.
According to him, all of the work done since 1987 (the two monographs, the papers published in international journals, the new discoveries...) justified and required the organisation of a major conference. This conference would have the main aim of discussing the arrival of hominids to Europe. But it was also clearly intended to provide fertile ground for getting his position regarding the Orce Man and the hominid presence in Orce finally accepted by the international scientific community.42 At that time, being at odds with the Institut director and with the Atapuerca research team, Gibert had little support from the Spanish scientific community. In order to get support, he turned to the international scientists that he had met in conferences around the world. He sent several letters to prominent scientists in order to invite them to be part of the conference’s Scientific Committee. As Gibert explained to García-Olivares, the reply from these scientists was ‘very positive’ and they were ‘looking forward to getting to know the sites and accepting the proposed paradigm.’43 As we shall see, this last term was often used by Gibert in the very Kuhnian sense of a revolution in the discipline. Gibert believed that his claims of a hominid presence in southern Spain approximately 1.5 million years ago and their arrival via the Strait of Gibraltar crossing was a completely new ‘paradigm’ in studies of the hominid colonisation of Europe.44
With regard to the international scientists, Gibert invited, for instance, Richard Leakey, who he had probably met at the Southampton conference in 1986 and maybe again in his travels to Kenya.45 Unfortunately for Gibert, in June 1993, just at the time when he was trying to contact him, a plane piloted by Leakey crashed and he was badly injured, losing his legs below the knee. Gibert also tried Meave Leakey, Richard’s wife, but it seems that the accident prevented Richard and Meave from accepting the invitation.46 So, it appears that Gibert tried to aim high in his ambitions regarding those scientists he believed should form part of the Scientific Committee. As we shall see, Gibert did not want to hold a standard conference. He was preparing something else, and for this, he
41 Myers 2003, 270. For more examples on funding for palaeoanthropology see: Kjærgaard 2012.
42 AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to García-Olivares, 1 October 1993 and Gibert 2004, 88-94.
43 ‘muy positiva’, ‘con ganas de conocer los yacimientos y aceptando el paradigma propuesto’, AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to García-Olivares, 1 October 1993.
44 See for instance: J. A., Diari de Sabadell 1986c and Gibert 2004, 56. In section 4.5 we will deal in more detail with these discursive uses.
45 AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to Meave Leakey, 3 December 1993.
46 Ibid.
needed internationally renowned scientists that could not only convince other colleagues at home and abroad, but also attract the media and politicians to the conference. Gibert needed science stars, and at that time, in palaeoanthropology, Leakey was the greatest of them all. After Leakey’s refusal, Gibert achieved two top palaeoanthropologists’ acceptance as invited guests: the French Yves Coppens and the South African Phillip Tobias, who had met Gibert at the 1989 conference in Turin.47 In Spain, Gibert managed to get Emiliano Aguirre, former director of the Atapuerca project, and José Maria Bermúdez de Castro, one of his disciples and then co-director of the Atapuerca project, to attend the conference. Agustí and Moyà-Solà did not attend. Henry de Lumley, although he corresponded cordially with Gibert and even seemed to consider attending, in the end did not.48 Eudald Carbonell and Juan Luis Arsuaga, the other scientists in charge of Atapuerca, did not attend either, despite being invited by Gibert. As we shall see later, the comparison of the Andalusian research with Atapuerca became very popular during the Orce conference. Later we will also analyse the conference attendees and their significance in greater depth.
The conference was also announced in the media. In July 1994, for instance, ABC published an article entitled ‘The Orce Man Resurrection’. In this article, the journalist explained Gibert’s team’s lack of excavation permits and the recent international publications, finally highlighting that a great international conference, with 35 of the most prestigious scientists in palaeoanthropology in the world, would be organised the following year.49 The Orce Man was alive and well again after Agustí and Moyà-Solà’s attack in 1987. More than seven years were needed to bring it back to the press headlines. The conference seemed to be the final result of the Orce Man’s ‘resurrection’.50 Michael Walker’s discoveries in Cabezo Gordo also received a considerable amount of media attention that same year, especially in Andalusia and Murcia.51 It was compared with Atapuerca as a key human origins site in Spain. With Cabezo Gordo in the media, Gibert did not miss the opportunity to promote Orce and Cueva Victoria as the ‘real’ First European sites.52
Just four months before the conference, in May 1995, Gibert gave a talk in the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya in Barcelona. He started the talk by reviewing the history of the controversy. In a very typical ‘heroic narrative’, Gibert began by stating that despite the ‘great shortage of resources’, his team had worked hard achieving many publications in international
47 Gibert 2004, 78. More on Coppens: Anonymous 2009 and on Tobias: Tobias 2005 and Goodrum 2013.
48 AJG-ICP: Letter from de Lumley to Gibert, 20 October 1994; Letter from de Lumley to Gibert, 24 April 1995; Letter from de Lumley to Gibert, 2 May 1995; Letter from Gibert to de Lumley, 29 June 1995.
49‘La “resurrección” del “hombre de Orce”’, De León-Sotelo, ABC 1994.
50 The TV Documentary Pedres que parlen also presented the conference as Gibert and the Orce Man’s revival:
Guàrdia/Pou 1996.
51 For instance: Hurtado, ABC 1994 and S.C., ABC 1994.
52 S.C., ABC 1994.
journals and several very promising and revolutionary studies on the Orce bone.53 Gibert also pointed out, twice, that large events like the conference were very useful for the development of the towns that host them.54 He also cited other controversies in the history of palaeoanthropology that for him illustrated how common such controversies are when discoveries challenge established theories. He talked about the rock paintings discovered in Altamira in Spain, which for Gibert were
‘called into question by all of French prehistory, which represented orthodoxy at that time.’55 Another controversy cited was the Taung Boy discovery by Raymond Dart (1893-1988) in South Africa.56 As we will see in the next chapter, Gibert used these historical examples several times to justify the reasons for the outbreak of the Orce controversy. Like these examples, the Orce Man discovery changed scientific ‘paradigms’ and was actively denied by the ‘establishment’.57
According to Gibert, one of the main aims of the conference was to generate a dialogue with those who were sceptical about his claims, or even with those who were completely against them.
Moreover, Gibert considered that the conference would be very useful for discussing hominid arrival to Europe in general.58 Yet, while Gibert’s discourse is full of ‘dialogue’ and ‘scientific discussion’, the conference documents clearly show how his main aim was not to ‘debate’ but to
‘convince’ his colleagues. As he states in the conference proceedings, ‘the important thing was to strengthen the Orce paradigm.’59 Similarly, Camilo José Cela-Conde, human evolution professor at the Universitat de les Illes Balears and conference participant, noted that ‘the obvious but unstated purpose of the conference was to conduct a general discussion about the Orce findings, in order to gain recognition from the international palaeontology community.’60
On 1 September 1995, just two days before the conference, Gibert received a fax with very bad news. Yves Coppens, one of the leading scientists expected at the conference, would finally not attend due to family issues.61 This was a heavy blow to Gibert’s ambition. Coppens was one of the members of the team that discovered and described the famous Lucy. A great star was lost at the very last minute, and it was not the only main character to be missing. Around the beginning of
53 ‘gran falta de recursos’. AJG-ICP: Presentation of the 1995 Conference in the Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya, 30 May 1995. An example of the use of this kind of heroic narrative in science could be Hevly 1996.
54 Ibid.
55 ‘puestas en duda por toda la prehistoria francesa, depositaria, en aquel momento de la ortodoxia’, Ibid. For a critical look at the Altamira case see Moro Abadía/Pelayo 2010. See more on these discursive uses in section 4.5 of this thesis.
56 Ibid. More details on Dart in Richmond 2009.
57 See section 4.5.
58 These statements appeared in several letters to the Conference guests, for instance AJG-ICP: Letter from Gibert to Gerhard Bosinski, 30 September 1993; Letter from Gibert to Ofer Bar-Yosef, 3 November 1993; Letter from Gibert to Jerold Lowenstein, 2 December 1993.
59 ‘lo importante era consolidar el paradigma’, Gibert 1999, 10. The Conference Proceedings: Gibert et al. (eds.) 1999.
60 Cela-Conde was also son of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camilo José Cela. ‘El propósito no declarado pero obvio de la conferencia era el de llevar a cabo un debate general acerca de los hallazgos de Orce, con el fin de obtener un reconocimiento de la comunidad paleontológica internacional.’ Cela-Conde 1996, 33.
61 AJG-ICP: Fax from Coppens to Florentina Sánchez and Josep Gibert, 1 September 1995.
1995, the Queen of Spain, Sofia, accepted the role of honorary chair of the Orce conference. Having studied her degree in archaeology in Greece, the Queen had always shown interest in the sciences, so the Orce conference was another initiative in which she was involved.62 However, in the end she did not attend the conference due to other official commitments. Despite these last minute losses, the 1995 Orce International Conference in Human Palaeontology was ready to begin. But, before continuing with the conference itself, let us try to understand the political relations that lay behind it.