After the positive reception of Gibert’s work in Southampton and its crucial coverage in the press, in 1987, the Junta de Andalucía granted him an excavation permit.152 According to Gibert, during this excavation he found the first stone tools of the Orce region in a site near Venta Micena called Barranco León.153 During that summer, Orce’s small museum, which was inaugurated after the original discovery’s presentation, was improved with the addition of two new rooms thanks to the support of Gibert’s team.154 The little Orce museum was beginning to be yet another sympathetic forum to support Gibert's claims.
Nevertheless, throughout the year, the Orce controversy hardly appeared at all in the Spanish press. At the beginning of October, Gibert went to Turin to present his work at an international conference. In the opening session, which Gibert did not attend, Marie-Antoinette de Lumley criticised the Orce Man. Yet when the Spanish researcher presented his work, not one of the approximately four hundred attendees discussed the presentation.155 According to him, since Marie-Antoinette had nothing to ask or any criticism to make, then nobody else did either.156
While Gibert was in Turin, on 2 October, Jordi Agustí and Salvador Moyà-Solà (co-discoverers of the Orce Man and former collaborators of Gibert’s) announced to the press the publication of an article in the Spanish scientific journal Estudios Geológicos in which they argued that the Orce cranial fragment belonged to an equine.157 The article was received by the journal on 20 October and not accepted until 21 November, so the announcement to the press was made not only before its acceptance but even before they had sent it to the journal.158 The Institut researchers had to establish their position first in the public arena and only afterwards in the scientific forum. It is also worth noting that they asked the Diputació politicians if they could ‘distance themselves’
from the Orce Man issue, a thing that they had not yet done publicly.159 Agustí stated in newspapers
151 Hilgartner 1990, 529. See also: Gregory 2003, 26.
152 Gibert 2004, 79.
153 Ibid., 83.
154 Martínez-Navarro 1993, 45.
155 Barata, El Periódico 1987b and Gibert 2004, 77-78.
156Gibert 2004, 78.
157 Mercadé, La Vanguardia 1987; Redacción, El País 1987; Barata, El Periódico 1987a. The scientific article is Agustí/Moyà-Solà 1987.
158 Agustí/Moyà-Solà 1987.
159 ‘Desmarcarse’, Interview with Agustí 2012.
that ‘the debate should have remained in the scientific publications, but the journalists’ treatment of the issue has given it a different dimension.’160 In the scientific article, Moyà-Solà and Agustí also complained that Gibert had not allowed them to take an x-ray of the fragment.161 That same day, both El País and La Vanguardia phoned Gibert in Turin to ask him for his opinion on Agustí and Moyà-Solà’s statements. Gibert said that this ‘attack’ happened due to ‘extra-scientific issues’; they wanted to undermine the significance of ‘his’ sites.162
Fig. 2.10: Coverage of Agustí and Moyà-Solà’s announcement in La Vanguardia (left) and in El Periódico (right).
Source: Mercadé, La Vanguardia 1987 and Barata, El Periódico 1987a.
After this new controversy, in 1988, the Venta Micena excavation permit was once more denied to Gibert’s team.163 In any case, the way that Agustí and Moyà-Solà made their aggressive move against Gibert shows how in order to clearly state and lay down their opinion regarding the Orce fragment, the first, fundamental, and most important step was public; the public statement.164 This way of acting, this ‘science by press conference’, occurs more often than we may think in public scientific controversies or important discoveries. The most well-known case, analysed several times by sociologists and historians of science, is the cold fusion saga.165 Yet, it is also common in palaeoanthropological debates like the Homo floresiensis dispute or the world-wide presentation of Ida, ‘the link’ (not ‘missing’ anymore).166 These studies have highlighted how the public exposure of scientific research can have several interests and objectives behind it.
What were Agustí and Moyà-Solà’s aims? If one of the critiques of Gibert was his penchant for
160 ‘El Debate debería haberse mantenido en los cauces de las publicaciones científicas pero que el tratamiento periodístico del tema le ha dado una dimensión distinta’, Mercadé, La Vanguardia 1987.
161 Agustí/Moyà-Solà 1987, 536
162 ‘Motivos extracientíficos’, Mercadé, La Vanguardia 1987 and Redacción, El País 1987.
163 Martínez-Navarro 1993, 26.
164 A similar instance regarding the cold fusion controversy can be found in Gieryn 1999, 187.
165 For instance: Lewenstein 1995 and Bucchi 1998, 36-81.
166 For the Flores ‘hobbit’ see Goulden 2011, and for the Ida public presentation see Kjærgaard 2011.
excess public exposure, then why did they jeopardise their morally superior position of having remained silent? Why the need to establish their new scientific position publicly? When this move was made, Agustí was already director of the Institut, so the reasons were not about accessing a better professional position. What then were the motivations for exposing themselves this way?
According to Agustí and Moyà-Solà, they did it because Gibert was publicly saying that ‘everybody in the Institut thinks that the bone is from a hominid’, and this was not true.167 Moreover, with their new position, Agustí and Moyà-Solà also tried to distance themselves once and for all from the Orce Man controversy. Beyond their own opinion on the fragment, they did not want to be linked to Gibert’s controversial position and tactics. Their desire to be distanced from Gibert’s opinion regarding the bone was also a desire to be removed from public dispute, from public exposure to controversy. They wanted to introduce themselves into uncontroversial ‘proper science’, what Truyols considered science. As we saw earlier, this delimitation not only separated different scientific positions but also defined credibility among scientists. Agustí and Moyà-Solà wanted to be considered credible, and to do so they had to go through the painful process of briefly exposing their position publicly.
In this chapter, we have seen how the media presence of science and scientific controversy matters to politicians; for instance, in their complaints about the ‘excessive’ Cueva Victoria dissemination efforts. Politicians declared that their decisions were based on purely ‘scientific’
reasons, but the media also had an impact on their actions. Their reaction to the media coverage of the Southampton conference or the permit denial after Agustí and Moyà-Solà’s announcement reveal how politicians made decisions in relation to scientific issues taking into account what the press said about them. The way that the controversy was presented in the media lobbied the politicians in their decision-making. These decisions at the same time affected the way that scientific research was taking place. So, the Orce Man controversy sheds light on how media coverage influences science through politicians.168 This, presumably, is a phenomenon that could happen often but that such a highly public controversy like the Orce Man makes especially visible.
We have also witnessed how the process that turned Gibert into a ‘marginalised scientist’ was not something that happened all of a sudden after the El País front page or after the El Papus cover. It was, instead, a complex process that began with the early popularisation effort and little by little accumulated accusations, ‘boundary-work’, but also self-portrayals, until it became a well-established notion in Gibert’s own discourse, other scientists’ views, and even in journalists’
considerations. Somehow then, beyond the denial of excavation permits, Gibert’s scientific isolation
167 ‘tothom a l’Institut pensa que l’òs és un homínid’, Interview with Agustí 2012 and Interview with Moyà-Solà 2012.
See also Personal Archive Jordi Agustí: Letter from Moyà-Solà to unknown, 24 september 1987.
168 See another instance in González-Silva 2007.
was in many ways a self-made position, a chosen one. In the following chapters, we will see what benefits Gibert gained from this position and how it contradicted other parts of his discourse.
Finally, for a little over three years, from May 1984 (when El País published the de Lumley reclassification) to October 1987 (when announced the publication of the first scientific paper dealing with this statement), the scientific debate around the Orce Man took place mainly in the public sphere. The Southampton conference or the Sabadell meeting, where a ‘scientific’
discussions were held, were widely reported on in the media. Journalists, politicians, and scientists gave their opinion to the press, which became the main communication channel for the controversy.
Moreover, Moyà-Solà and Agustí only published their article because Gibert insisted on saying that everybody in the Institut agreed that the Orce Man was in fact a man. Had Gibert not insisted on the hominid argument, had he forgotten about the controversy, the El País front page could perhaps have been enough to establish that the Orce Man was in fact an equine. Thus, this shows us how in this instance the El País newspaper acted as a scientific channel among the community. Equally, if any scientist wanted to keep up to date on research on the Orce fragment and the dispute about it, they could attend any scientific conference that Gibert participated in, but by reading newspapers and other public media they could not only get information on these conferences, but also several details on the bone and Gibert’s and his opponents’ moves, research, and opinions. Therefore, newspapers and the mass media acted as ‘scientific channels’ for the scientific community to get information on Orce. The way that Agustí and Moyà-Solà announced their publication clearly shows how traditional scientific publications were not enough to disseminate their opinion among peers, and a public statement was also necessary to convince them. At least during these first three years (from 1984 to 1987), the press and the mass media in general were spaces were science was legitimated and discussed beyond traditional scientific conferences or journals.169 The media visibility of this scientific article had authority in the validation of scientific knowledge.170 In this
‘different dimension’, the media became a crucial step in the process of validating scientific knowledge.171
169 Shinn/Cloître 1985 and Bucchi 1998, use the concept of ‘crystallization’ or ‘ temporary crystallization’, according to which, certain concepts or discoveries fit better in certain media but not another. Somehow the Orce Man issue was
‘crystallized’ in the scientific level and, as Bucchi states, ‘require(d) the intervention of the public to determine the success of one party over another’, Bucchi 1998, 11.
170 Another example in Van Dijck 2008, 390.
171 See a similar point in Gieryn 1999, 200-201.
3. Conference
It is a warm September evening in the central square of a small Andalusian village. Several screens and a number of chairs have been set up. People take their seats. Yet, instead of the latest Hollywood movie, they are about to watch the final session of an international scientific conference on human palaeontology. The session begins. At some point during the live broadcast, the floor is given to a well-known international scholar. ‘He’s a prominent authority’ can be heard in the square.
The scholar begins: ‘When I came, some days ago, I was very sceptical about the claims made regarding this region. Now, after I have seen the sites, examined the remains, and heard the presentations, I am fully convinced of the validity of these claims.’ The crowd in the square is excited; it seemed like all of the doubts were fading away.
In this third chapter, we will get to know Gibert’s team and their efforts to recover from the early controversial years. We will see how Orce became Gibert’s own fortress where he could protect his research from the controversy. We will explore the scientific, public, and political conditions that allowed him to organise a major international conference in September 1995. The core of this chapter will be the analysis of this conference: participants, presentations, site visits, and media attention. We will see how Gibert used the conference as a reflection of his own research project and therefore of his own credibility as a scientist. For him, its organisation validated his own scientific claims. This reflection was intended to be seen not only by scientists but also by journalists and politicians. Its final success seemed to ratify Gibert’s scientific, political, and public positions. Finally, we will see how a new public controversy broke out after the conference with the clear aim of dismantling its success and Gibert’s ‘local power’.