The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom

Reading this book was like a validation for many ideas I've had about our prehistoric past. Finally I have found a scholar who sees what I see in the depths of prehistory! Woodwoses, ogres and trolls.... dwarves, sidhe and fay...all come from real encounters some 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. And Neanderthal was not completely exterminated from the face of the Earth, but did indeed breed with homo sapien. Only the most extreme neanderthals, the classic neanderthals of inner europe, actually became extinct.
Though the book is somewhat dated, a student of modern anthropology can easily gain great insight by allowing that Gooch's definition of "neanderthal" is much broader than what we currently define as such.


Gooch understands that we're hybrids, and bolsters the arguement for multiregionalism. If one were to change his Neanderthal 1 to Heidelberg and Sons, (Heidelberg, Idaltu, Neanderthal, Classic Neanderthal, etc) and his Neanderthal 2 to Erectus and Sons (the asian ones, not ergaster), and his Northern Indian cro-magnon ancestors to Antecessor and Sons, then we might have a more updated version of the theory. Personally, I'd like to add that all of the above could have very easilly been hybrids; not just us.
Hybrids of hybrids of hybrids. Because erectus was mating with antecessor was shagging ergaster was loving habilis, and they might even invited rudolphensis every third month on the full moon. We are a species that likes to do other species, and not even always just primates, so it shouldn't be so surprising to these scientists. It's going to happen, and every once and a while it's gonna work in a reproductive sense, because all these species of hominid are very close to one another. We just had too many chances for it not to work sometimes with one brand of hominid or the other.
What's more we're pack animals; nomadic, sometimes even herding. We've been migrating out of Africa along the coast to Sundaland and then getting flooded out and sent back to Africa for millions of years, and to Europe and back for almost as long do to the shifting glaciers. Europe and Sundaland were and are natural evolutionary machines.

Yes, somewhere there was a bottleneck, and some other as of yet unknown anomalies, that make it hard for us to figure out the genetic trail. But if our mother is only 180,000 years old, then she had at least a little bit of all of the above in her. When genetics discounts neanderthal man, it doesn't account for any crossover before 180,000. It doesn't consider that only one sex of a species may have survived. When comparing modern man's DNA to that of a 27,000 year old hominid, they don't consider that traces which are extinct today may not have been extinct 1000 years ago, or 10,000. Genocide happens repeatedly throughout history.

But this book is not so much anthropological as cultural and psychological. The author provides us with observations that only one of his varied disciplines could summon. For in addition to brilliant sociological, archeological, and anthropological insights, Gooch provides us with excellent insights into the ancient religion of the Neanderthals, as well as the origin of many of our more well-known fairy tales, myths and legends. Painstakingly researched and innovative in its understanding, this is an essential book for those who are curious about the true origins of our culture and species.

The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom