The Scientific Importance of Emiliano Aguirre in the Past and Future of the Atapuerca Project
A description of Emiliano Aguirre’s scientific achievements, his character and his importance for what is now known as the Atapuerca Project, exceeds the scope of these brief lines. For that reason, a comprehensive monograph on his life, written by some of the people who knew him well, is published in this issue. Looking beyond the specific features of his personality and his professional career, there are aspects of his life that have shaped a legacy whose importance transcends the thoroughly deserved tribute that we are paying to him. In this context, one might ask what is the essential legacy of Emiliano Aguirre? What is it that we can learn from his work to help us consolidate and build the future of the Atapuerca Project?
Let us start at the beginning: Who was Emiliano Aguirre in scientific terms? Aguirre belonged to a "lost" generation of Spanish scientists. He lived through a period of backwardness and isolation, the consequence of the tragic Spanish Civil War and the subsequent post-war period that devastated his country’s scientific progress. In the 1960s and 1970s, the decades that spanned much of his professional career, Spain was a scientifically underdeveloped country, practically isolated from the global scientific community, with just a few outstanding figures of renown.
One of those figures was precisely Emiliano Aguirre, who stood out in the field of Vertebrate Palaeontology thanks to his work on a group that was particularly difficult to study: elephants. The Elephantidae family includes today's Asian and African elephants, as well as several fossil species, the most famous of which are commonly known as "mammoths". The molars of these extinct animals are the basis for much of our knowledge about them, although their complex shape made it very difficult to define their taxonomy and evolution. Renowned specialists had failed in this aspect, a mission worthy of a modern Hercules of Palaeontology. Aguirre proved to be that Hercules. Working alone, he uncovered the secrets of elephant evolution, and in 1969, published his results in the prestigious journal Science in an article that was a milestone in the history of Spanish science. Never before had a single Spanish author been published in Science, and no others have done so since. His publications earned him major prestige in the world palaeontological community, and they opened the door to meetings and collaboration with world-class researchers such as Clark Howell, Phillip Tobias and Louis Leakey. This collaboration enabled Aguirre to train and research in a field that had always been a passion for him, Palaeoanthropology.
In 1976, when Trinidad Torres showed him a human jawbone that some enthusiasts from the Edelweiss Caving Group had discovered by chance during a brief dig under his supervision in a sinkhole, Sima de los Huesos, Aguirre instantly realised the importance of the discovery. He immediately devised an ambitious excavation and research project that would include not only Sima de los Huesos, but also other sites in the nearby Railway Cutting. His idea was truly audacious due to the technical difficulty of the project: extremely difficult access in the case of Sima de los Huesos, and the size and topology of the Railway Cutting. There were no precedents for excavations in such complicated places back then. Drawing on the knowledge and experience he had gained in his work with the world’s leading prehistorians, Aguirre managed to draft a robust scientific project which bore its first fruits in the early 1980s. Among those fruits were over 100 fossilized human bones unearthed during the 1983 and 1984 digs in Sima de los Huesos. Then came the most important moment in Aguirre's career, when he made the transcendental decision that proved to be the cornerstone for the future of the Atapuerca Project.
In the autumn of 1984, Aguirre received a group of distinguished foreign scientists. In the light of the newly discovered fossils, they proposed a broad-scale collaboration in which specialists from his team would study the human bones along with other aspects of major importance such as the fossilised fauna and accurate datings to ascertain the age of the bones. Aguirre clearly remembered these foreign researchers asking him, "Are there any specialists in Spain who can study these fossils rigorously?", to which he replied, "If there aren’t any right now, I have no doubt there will be soon". Emiliano Aguirre’s decision to reserve the study of the fossilized human bones from Atapuerca for his team’s young researchers, even if it meant delaying their study while they were completing their training, laid the foundations for what a few short years later became the Atapuerca Project. Aguirre could have been tempted to reap faster results that would have considerably increased his international prestige. Instead, he preferred to sacrifice his own personal interest in order to give the first batch of Spanish palaeoanthropologists the chance to train in their own country. If he had handed over the bones to those prestigious specialists, the first generation of local palaeoanthropologists would never have gained their expertise here, and the Atapuerca Project would probably never have taken its current shape.
Aguirre didn’t stop at giving his young disciples the chance to study the Atapuerca fossil record. In the following years, he provided them with backing for their research, he encouraged them to set themselves ambitious goals and above all, he allowed them to grow professionally. And so it was that by the time he retired in 1990, barely six years after his crucial decision, he had already built a solid team headed by his three most advanced disciples, who were able to pick up and carry his baton with ease.
The new Atapuerca Project management team remained true to Aguirre's two core principles: on the one hand, ensuring that the bones and the archaeological and palaeontological records from the Atapuerca hills would serve first and foremost to foster the growth of prehistoric science in Spain, and on the other, continuing his vision of a management team dedicated to the support and promotion of young researchers. The new directors added a third principle: to open up the Atapuerca Project to the global scientific community at the same pace as the team’s maturing experts consolidated genuinely cooperative relationships with the outside world on equal terms in knowledge and training. And that is how Aguirre's professional legacy, continued and expanded by the three current directors, has been the basis for the Atapuerca Project’s evolution into the planet’s largest Human Evolution project, in the broadest sense of the word. No other scientific team in the world is as numerous, as well-trained or formed by so many scientific institutions from so many countries.
This reflection on Aguirre's legacy would be incomplete without a mention of another of his pioneering initiatives which has become a major focus for his successors: the social impact of the Project. When scientists, academic and politicians who are not familiar with Atapuerca first visit the sites and discover the vast scope of the Project, there is one aspect which surprises them as much as —sometimes even more than— its scientific importance. This is the extraordinary social roots of the Atapuerca Project in Burgos society, embodied in the Atapuerca Foundation and what is now called the Atapuerca System. Nowhere else in the world is there such deep rapport between scientists and society. Nowhere else is there a museum like the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos, nor a research centre of the calibre of the National Human Evolution Research Centre (CENIEH), nor has any other university committed as much effort as the University of Burgos to include the work by a particular scientific team in its undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD programmes. The importance of the Atapuerca archaeological sites is now a major income generator for the Burgos District, but it is also a major source of pride and self-esteem for the citizens of Burgos, the Castile-Leon Region and Spain as a whole.
Today, Atapuerca is synonymous with a job well done on every level of the project, from scientific and academic to institutional. We have achieved that together by working together, succeeding —and sometimes failing— together. Now it is up to us to go on dreaming together about the future, remembering everything that we owe to a great man born on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, who came to work in our land and who has left us an extraordinary legacy. We are deeply grateful to you for all of that. We shall never forget you. Farewell, Emiliano.