[1][2] The specimen was discovered by Josep Gibert in 1982[3]-1983 at Venta Micena, one of several paleo-archaeological sites in the municipality of Orce, Granada, Spain.

This team was young and established experts in various fields except paleoanthropology, and took the fragment to Barcelona, which funded the Sabadell Institute of Paleontology and thus their research.

They enlisted the paleontologists Rafael Adrover, Pierre Mein, and Peter Andrews for taxonomic identification, and they agreed that the specimen was human.

At this time, the endocast of the vault remained attached to rock, but Gibert's team insisted that the portion cleaned was enough to publish it in May 1983 as the oldest human in Europe, sending it to the Granada press.

In 1995, a conference hosted by Gibert agreed with his findings, leading to a brief period of acceptance followed by statements by José María Bermúdez de Castro and Eudald Carbonell of Atapuerca suggesting that he is not scientifically rigorous.

Baruzzi (2013) note that during this controversy, Gibert maintained an eccentric and unorthodox attitude heading a paradigm shift in human evolution as a sort of revolutionary.

Since he was considered prestigious locally, Baruzzi suggests that the Orce Man scandal was an attempt to sully his image, and that the media frenzy lessened in 1999.

[1] Gibert et al. (1989) note that comparison with carnivores is impossible due to a prominent sagittal and occipito-transverse crest and defined differences from bears (i.e. suture straightness, closure, impression pronouncement, thickness).

Additionally, they call for scientists to consider that it is more likely that it is an ordinary equine than a hominin exhibiting rare morphological combinations and pathologies, and that it is flawed "wishful thinking" otherwise.

A lower left first deciduous molar with a worn occlusal surface and resorption in the roots suggesting antemortem shedding, catalogued as BL02-J54-100, was described by Toro-Moyano et al. (2013) and found to be 1.4 million years old.

A defined mesial marginal ridge is elongated by a vestigial paraconid and separates from the metaconid by a deep, V-shaped groove, opening in the direction of the lingual face.