Orce

Orce is a Spanish village famous for the controversy regarding the supposed finding of the oldest Eurasian hominid: the Orce man. Orce is near the Venta Micena paleontological site in the Guadix-Baza basin,Granada province, Spain. In 1982, a small cranial fragment was found in the Venta Micena excavation quarry and was published in 1983 as Homo sp. by Josep Gibert, Jordi Agustí,and Salvador Moyà Solà. They claimed that this fossil, unearthed from sediments 1.8 million years old, constituted the oldest hominid found in Eurasia and belonged to Homo erectus or even Homo habilis. Once the fossil was cleaned, in the inner face a prominent crest appeared, and the controversy began. The prestigious French paleoanthropologists,Henry and Marie Antoinette de Lumley, retracted their support of the hominid attribution. Agustí and Moyà Solà published a paper in 1987 concluding that the suture and the crest made impossible the attribution to Homo and the fossil was reattributed to Equus. Nevertheless, Gibert decided to maintain his attribution to Homo and began a controversial search for evidence and support.

The fragmentary fossil, popularly named the “biscuit,” given its small size and rounded form, was exhaustively analyzed. Domènec Campillo concluded, based on the contradictory morphology, that it belonged to an infant of the genera Homo. Enrique García Olivares also concluded, based on immunō logical analyses, that the fossil belonged to a hominid, but it was suspicious that a fossil so old contained such high quantities of human albumin. Paul Palmqvist studied the cranial suture using fractal analysis and also concluded that the fossil could have belonged to the genus Homo.However, Palmqvist soon realized that the oversimplified suture sent by Gibert was not real, accused him of fraud, and published another paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, reevaluating the evidence and concluding that the fossil may have belonged to a 3- to5-month-old horse. The details regarding this controversy were reported in 1998 by Eustoquio Molina in the journal El Escéptico, concluding that this could be a case of pathological science.

The controversy was magnified by the mass media, where Gibert looked for support, making many sensational claims. Three outstanding Spanish paleontologists replied in a newspaper article, criticizing the Gibert methodology. As was stated long ago by David Hume, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence (Occam's razor), however the evidence found by Gibert and his colleagues is not extraordinary but very suspicious and controversial. Consequently, the [Page 1789]most plausible attribution of the fragmentary fossil is to Equus, which is very abundant in the site, although based on a recent reinterpretation of the anatomical evidence by Bienvenido Martínez Navarro, it could be attributed to a ruminant, which is also frequent in the site. Nevertheless, Gibert still maintains the hominid attribution in his controversial book, El Hombre de Orce: Los Homínidos que Llegaron del Sur (2004). At present, few scientists believe Gibert's sensational claims, but he still has the support of his friend Campillo, who published another controversial book, El Cráneo Infantil de Orce: El Homínido Más Antiguo de Eurasia (2002).

The oldest fossil hominid remains in Eurasia cannot be the controversial fossil fragment from the Venta Micena site, which is not considered human. At present, the oldest human remains in Spain are those of Homo antecessor from the Trinchera Dolina site (Atapuerca) dated at 0.78 million years. Furthermore, the oldest hominid evidence is the lithic industry that has been recently found at the Sima del Elefante site (Atapuerca) and Barranco León-5 and Fuente Nueva-3 sites (Orce). This evidence is dated at about 1 to 1.3 million years, having been found just below Jaramillo in the Matuyama magnetochron.

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