This thesis thus tackles the history and analysis of a palaeoanthropological discovery and the subsequent public controversy. It draws a chronological narrative of the controversy, respecting as much as possible the sequence of events.35 This allows us to analyse these events in their particular context and thus reduces interpretations of the facts on the basis of later developments in the story.
This will be of crucial importance in chapter one, as the detailed review it presents will call into question some accounts of the pre-controversy period. At the same time, this thesis uses the methodological approach of symmetry put forward by sociologist David Bloor.36 According to this approach, the historian or sociologist must apply the same explanations to those scientific claims that are taken to be true and those that are taken to be false since both are shaped and constructed by the same social processes. This has dramatic effects on the way that we deal with the Orce controversy: unlike most, if not all, of the accounts and reviews of this dispute, this thesis will not try to explain who was right and why. It is not important for us whether the Orce bone belonged to a hominid or not. Instead, this thesis will attempt to understand all of the different actors’ positions in an effort to treat both sides of the controversy equally. What interests us is the examination of the strategies and circumstances that make a certain claim credible or not for both the scientific community and the general public. This thesis is more concerned with how and why a certain claim is credible rather than how and why it is true.
In order to approach the controversy this way, five main sources of information have been used. Firstly, written public primary sources: mainly newspapers, magazines, scientific papers, and books. Secondly, written private primary sources from personal and institutional archives. Thirdly, recorded primary sources: mainly news pieces, interviews, and documentaries that dealt with the
34 Hochadel 2013b, 26-27.
35 For more on narratives in history of science see: Golinski 1998, 186-206.
36 For instance: Lynch 1994, 76-80.
Orce Man, as well as video recordings of the Orce conference. Fourth, interviews, both face to face and via email, with some of the researchers involved in the controversy. And, finally, secondary literature. Let us now review the features, problems, and advantages of these different sources.
With regard to newspapers, in-depth examination was carried out on four national papers that represent the different ideological, geographical, and historical positions of the country. On the one hand, two traditional and conservative newspapers both dating back to the 19th century: ABC, published in Madrid and Seville, and La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona.37 On the other hand, two new newspapers that represent the left-wing ideas of the new democratic state: El País, published in Madrid, and El Periódico, published in Barcelona.38 These four newspapers have been used as the basis to represent the national impact of the Orce story. At the local level, two newspapers have also been of great importance, both for reconstructing local media interest in the case and for accessing information that often did not reach the national level. In Sabadell, where the discoverers came from, the Diari de Sabadell often published relevant news before the others. In Granada, where the bone was found, El Ideal de Granada has been the newspaper most used.
Despite the fact that focusing the analysis on only six newspapers could potentially result in the absence of plurality of approaches to the controversy, the newspapers selected to a great extent represent all of the Spanish daily publications that dealt with the Orce Man. Yet, on certain occasions other newspapers have also been used without having performed an in-depth examination of them. Some are national, such as El Mundo, some Catalan, such as Avui or Diari de Terrassa, and some are from Granada, such as El Defensor de Granada or El Diario de Granada. This thesis has also benefited from inquiries into the echo of the Orce discovery and the subsequent controversy in the international press. In this regard, the British press, especially The Times, devoted several news pieces to Orce, but the American and German press also paid attention to the case in its different phases. Spanish weekly magazines like Muy Interesante or Cambio 16 have also been examined, together with satirical magazines like El Papus or El Jueves. Yet, most of these publications covered just one of the episodes of the controversy and did not follow it over the years as the daily newspapers analysed did. With regard to popular specialist publications, the archaeology popularisation magazine Revista de Arqueología published pieces on Orce from the discovery until after Gibert’s death. Similarly, national and international science popularisation magazines, such as Investigación y Ciencia, New Scientist, National Geographic, or La Recherche, were very important at certain points in the story, especially during and after the Orce conference. All of this published
37 For La Vanguardia see Huertas 2006, and for ABC see Olmos 2002.
38 For El País see González-Silva 2009, 220, and Seoane/Sueiro 2004. For El Periódico see Wikipedia Contributors ‘El Periódico de Catalunya’. For an overview of the readership of Spanish newspapers in Catalonia in this period see Cardús 1999.
material contains a huge amount of information on the different phases of the controversy. Often, it must be used carefully, since it could contain biased or partial information. Yet, on other occasions, and again especially in the first chapter (before the controversy), published information has been be very useful for taking apart some of the ideas constructed retrospectively about this period.
At this point, it seems necessary to indicate the difficulty of finding out more about who the journalists that covered the Orce discovery were. At that time in Spain, there was almost no such thing as professional scientific journalism, and scientific news items were covered by different journalists who also covered other areas like culture, politics, or sports. In the Orce case, there was no journalist that followed the entire story intensively. Therefore, despite journalists certainly having their own relevant backgrounds, intentions, and relationships, it has not been possible to identify them appropriately in this work. In any case, all of the reports and articles studied in this thesis have been of paramount importance for understanding the extent to which the controversy was a public one, and how it reached the general public.
Three popular science books dealing with the Orce Man have been published, all by defenders of the cranial fragment’s hominid classification. These three books have also been very useful for this thesis. Gibert’s own account of the controversy has been a great source for tracing the events.39 Of course, this information must be taken with caution since we are dealing with one of the main characters of the story. At the same time, Gibert’s book was written in 2004 (twenty years after the controversy broke out) and thus must be considered as a product of 2004 and not as a direct source from the 1980s. Despite these problems, Gibert’s book has been one of the main sources for this thesis.
Hundreds of scientific articles have been published on the Orce area and, specifically, on the Orce cranial fragment since 1983. Due to the difficulty of analysing them all, this thesis focuses its study on those articles that were crucial for the development of the story. Most of them, published by both sides, served as responses to previous publications by the other side, or presented fresh ideas that were later discussed among contenders. This reduces the number to about fifteen to twenty articles that were truly relevant to the controversy and that have been studied in depth for this thesis.40
Private documents are a completely different kind of source. This thesis has benefited from the consultation of two personal archives and one institutional archive. The latter was the Diputació de Barcelona’s historical archive. Despite not many documents being found, the few that appeared
39 For a detailed description and analysis of Gibert’s book see section 4.5 of this thesis.
40 For the complete references for these articles see the bibliography.
were very useful. As mentioned earlier, one of the main characters of the Orce story, Jordi Agustí, had a folder with several documents (especially personal letters) that have also been very useful for this thesis. These documents, together with the hundreds of documents kept in Josep Gibert’s archive in the Institut de Paleontologia de Sabadell, revealed contact between different actors in the controversy that did not appear in the media. Generally, Josep Gibert’s archive has been one of the main, if not the main, source for this thesis, providing it with a wealth of information. However, there is still a lack of exploration of the Andalusian side of the archived material, mainly the material that could perhaps be found in the archives of the Junta de Andalucía and the Orce Town Council and Museum. The lack of resources and time has made this task impossible to tackle within the limits of this research project.
Once again, the period around the 1995 Orce international conference is the period for which the most recorded material has been gathered, both public (mainly news pieces and reports) and private (video recordings of the event made by the organisers). All of this material has been made available thanks to Lluís Gibert, Josep’s Gibert’s son, who was also involved in the controversy. This material has been very useful for developing the content of chapter 3, which is devoted to the conference. It is essential for understanding the characteristics of the conference, finding out more about who participated in the opening and closing sessions, and exploring what they said. This was an excellent ‘eye on the past’ thanks to which the significance of the conference and its echo in the media are clearly revealed. Beyond this period, we also have some early television appearances by Gibert from 1983-1984 and some reports and interviews from the later phases of the controversy (2000 onwards). There are at least three documentaries dealing exclusively or partially with the Orce Man controversy. Yet, mostly, they present the controversy from Josep Gibert’s point of view, highlighting his marginalised position and how he recovered from all the dirty tricks played on him. These documentaries could be useful for certain information but do not offer a complete view of the dispute as this thesis aims to do.41
I also conducted interviews with some of the main characters of the Orce story. The interviewees include Jordi Agustí, Salvador Moyà-Solà, Lluís Gibert, Domènec Campillo, and others.42 In addition, a recorded interview with Josep Gibert before he died was also used despite it not being exclusively devoted to the Orce question. In these interviews, I had the opportunity to speak with people that were, and even still are, very involved in the controversy. This, of course, conditioned the questions asked, as well as the analysis and use of the answers. At the same time, performing interviews also has its advantages. On the one hand, direct contact with these actors
41 Guàrdia/Pou 1996; Balart 2007; and Navarro 2010.
42 See a list of the interviews in the bibliography.
allows for the gathering of unpublished information which is otherwise often impossible to obtain.
On the other hand, this direct contact provides a first-hand example of some individual’s positions in the controversy, their reasoning, and their ways of acting. In this regard, and together with the generosity of most of those interviewed who provided me with numerous documents and other sources, the interviews themselves have been a great source for exploring the Orce problem.43
Finally, a great amount of secondary literature has been of paramount importance for this thesis. Three historiographical lines of research form its main framework: studies on scientific controversies, science-media studies, and studies on the history of palaeoanthropology and human origins research. These three historiographical approaches will be explained next in three separate sections. The different studies have, of course, some overlap that will be of major benefit for this thesis, which itself, in fact, represents an overlapping of the three. Beyond the concrete points where these works are mentioned, all of them have in some way or another influenced the development of the research and the ideas presented in this thesis.
0.3.1. Studying scientific disagreement
Despite the study of scientific controversies being one of the main fields of research for social historians of science, so far, there is not much historiography devoted entirely to analysing this phenomenon.44 Yet, for the sociology of scientific knowledge, controversies are a crucial field of study as they clearly and more openly reveal social aspects of scientific processes that usually remain hidden and inexplicit.45 At the same time, studying controversial scientists, the anti-heroes in scientific controversies, also helps to reveal the ways that science works, as those marginalised by their peers have to ‘sell’ themselves and their positions more conspicuously. This situation brings the motivations and strategies of these scientists more clearly out into the open, again helping us understand the broader aspects of how scientific processes work. In his book, Science in Action, Bruno Latour already discussed some of these strategies, but he mostly analysed the way science works within so-called scientific communities, scientific channels of communication, scientific articles, and scientific conferences.46 Latour very rarely dealt with mass media communication and the strategies used in these channels. This thesis aims to build on Latour’s approach in order to see how a great range of actors, from scientists themselves to politicians, use similar techniques in order
43 For more on the use of the oral history of science see for instance: Chadarevian 1997.
44 Volumes devoted to controversies include Engelhardt/Caplan 1987; Machammer/Pera/Baltas 2000; and Martin 2014.
45 Pinch 1994, 88.
46 Latour 1987.
to achieve their aims.
In the following sections we will deal with the existing literature on science and its ‘publics’
and on the history of palaeoanthropology. But first, in this section, we will handle the historiography of controversies linked to sciences and scientific issues that are similar or related to palaeoanthropology; for example, archaeology, geology, or palaeontology. In this regard, the key work is Martin Rudwick’s classic study The Great Devonian Controversy.47 Rudwick’s chronological and very detailed account of the disputes among gentlemanly geologists in the 19th century has certainly influenced and shaped the way that this thesis is presented. The way that Rudwick managed, in his own words, to make ‘small facts speak to large issues’ is what this thesis also aims to achieve. Yet, the Great Devonian Controversy was not a classic example of a ‘public’
controversy, as the Orce Man controversy was. For a more public analysis of controversies in these sciences we have to turn to other authors. In 1986, Elisabeth S. Clemens published an article in Social Studies of Science in which she analysed newspaper coverage of the debate around the hypothesis of the asteroid that caused the extinction of dinosaurs.48 In her paper, Clemens addressed the question of how the professional but also crucially the public press contributed to shaping the scientific debate. This kind of approach, which highlighted the increasing interest of the scientific community itself in scientific issues capable of generating general news, and the transformation of journals like Nature or Science in this regard, has been very important for providing a framework for this thesis.
In her doctoral thesis, archaeologist Tera Pruitt explored the bizarre claims made about the existence of one of the largest pyramids in the world, apparently built by an ancient and completely vanished civilisation in the little town of Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina.49 Pruitt highlighted the need to approach this kind of archaeology in a way that went beyond the simple labels of ‘alternative’ or
‘pseudo’, and instead tried to understand how and why these kinds of claims arise and gain the favour of certain sectors of society. The way Pruitt analyses the media strategies and authority performances of the discoverer and main proponent of the validity of these pyramids has been very useful for this thesis, despite the fact that with the Orce Man we are dealing with a completely different case. Like the present study, Pruitt also looks at the socio-political context to explain the Visoko town and the Bosnian politicians’ desire for the pyramids to be validated (primarily with the goal of promoting tourism).
In her analysis of the controversy over discoveries made in Troy by a German team, science
47 Rudwick 1985.
48 Clemens 1986.
49 Pruitt 2011.
and technology studies (STS) scholar Susann Wagenknecht analyses how daily scientific practice is influenced by its public appearances. Wagenknecht concludes that academic and public discourses are interrelated since precisely due to public debate, academic meetings were held and publications were released.50 As we shall see, Wagenknecht’s claim that public debate has a kind of catalytic effect on academia can be applied perfectly to the Orce Man case. Finally, historian of science Raf de Bont also has some very interesting work on the famous Eolith controversy and on Belgian prehistorian Aimé Rutot’s role in it.51 De Bont provides a detailed analysis of Rutot’s strategies, networks, publishing choices... concluding that his texts and claims alone cannot explain the rise and fall of his reputation.52 Similarly, this thesis will deal with the manoeuvres of historical actors in the controversy. To sum up, existing work on scientific controversy case studies, and especially those related to sciences linked to palaeoanthropology, form a solid collection of research. Despite the lack of comprehensive analyses of how controversies develop in these sciences, these studies provide a very useful base on which to develop an analysis of the characteristics of the Orce Man case.
Aside from geo-, palaeo-, and archaeo- sciences, there are several historical and sociological studies on scientific controversies. Perhaps the recent controversy analysed in the greatest depth and detail is the so-called cold fusion saga, which took place at a similar time to that of the Orce Man.53 The cold fusion controversy started when two electrochemists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City held a press conference and presented a method to obtain fusion at room temperature with a simple apparatus. This apparently presented the opportunity to solve the world’s energy problems and created hysteria among the scientific community which criticised both the scientific experiment and the way it was presented. The particularities of this case are manifold, yet, it opened up several questions for sociologists that could be very useful for developing an approach to scientific controversies and to scientific practice in general. Bruce V. Lewenstein published a couple
Aside from geo-, palaeo-, and archaeo- sciences, there are several historical and sociological studies on scientific controversies. Perhaps the recent controversy analysed in the greatest depth and detail is the so-called cold fusion saga, which took place at a similar time to that of the Orce Man.53 The cold fusion controversy started when two electrochemists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City held a press conference and presented a method to obtain fusion at room temperature with a simple apparatus. This apparently presented the opportunity to solve the world’s energy problems and created hysteria among the scientific community which criticised both the scientific experiment and the way it was presented. The particularities of this case are manifold, yet, it opened up several questions for sociologists that could be very useful for developing an approach to scientific controversies and to scientific practice in general. Bruce V. Lewenstein published a couple