Sleeve notes to The Neanderthal Question, 1977

Neanderthal man is so called because his bones were first found in the valley (thal) of the River Neander in Germany.
This world is sometimes confused with the word ‘neanthropic’. Ne-anthropic, however, means ‘new man’ (ne=new, anthropic=man). Neanderthal himself is ‘paleo-anthropic’, meaning ‘ancient man’.
Neanderthal was succeeded in Europe by Cro-Magnon man. Like ourselves, Cro-Magnon is a representative of neanthropic man.

From the depths of our evolutionary past Stan Gooch has summoned the spectre of an ancestor we had forgotten we had ever had – Neanderthal man. In this book Neanderthal emerges suddenly from the shadows and no less from the depths of the unconscious mind, to confront us with his stunted body, his mystic strangeness and magical powers. The hunch-backed dwarf and the fearsome troll are no figments of our imagination or the fairytale. They are memories of our own origin.

Yet Neanderthal is only one of our two ancestors. The second is Cro-Magnon man. Unlike Neanderthal he evolved not in Africa and Europe, but along the banks of the great Brahmaputra, Indus and Ganges rivers in northern India – a tall, blue-eyed hunter and fighter of the open plains. Cro-Magnon in us today is the warrior hero of battles and adventures, the incurable romantic. It is his image we find in the ancient songs of the mediaeval minstrels. He is the Viking, the knight-at-arms, the conqueror, the adventurer, the restless seeker of the Holy Grail in the far corners of this planet. Now in his endless search he reaches for the stars. Yet always and always his shadow and helper is Neanderthal. Without Neanderthal he is nothing.

These two early forms of man finally confronted each other in the land we call Israel, 35,000 years ago. In their respective minds fear, contempt and awe struggle for expression. Yet the ‘Sons of God’ (Cro-Magnon) find the ‘Daughters of Men’ (Neanderthal) irresistible. From this coupling of master and mystic emerges a miraculous, bastard progeny – ourselves. Torn inwardly in two opposite directions, modern man has so far tried in vain to master his Faustian destiny of ‘two souls in one breast’. Gifted, yet deformed, we are at once Cain and Abel.

Stan Gooch’s work is no Gothic novel. Although it ‘inhabits the same world as Dracula, Wagner’s Ring cycle and the romantic half-light of the world of hidden gods’ (Colin Wilson), it is, as Wilson also notes, a perfectly genuine contribution to evolutionary theory and modern depth psychology.

In this book the biological history of our divided ancestry is also traced on the one side to the chimpanzee and gorilla, and on the other side to the orang-utan and the gibbon. The scenario modern man acts out today was in written 12 million years ago. Its unmistakable traces are found among the fossil bones, in the ancient structures of our own bodies and nervous system and in the present behaviours of apes in Africa and the Far East. No less than on legend, Stan Gooch draws on the work of Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, Desmond Morris, Loren Eisley and many more internationally acclaimed biologists and anthropologists.

Reproduced with kind permission of the Author. All copywrites apply.