A 100,000-Year-Old Civilisation?
see PART 1:
https://theorbo1.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/neanderthals-they-were-human/
They were HUMAN.
ANCIENT ALIEN MYSTERY OF THE CARPATHIAN SPHINX
04 FEBR. 2014
Now presenting fascinating new theories and discoveries about the missing link of human evolution and the soul of man, as we explore the Ancient Mystery of the Carpathian Sphinx and evidence of an intervening leap in human evolution that occurred deep in our ancient past. Featuring Dr. Robert Schoch and filmmaker Oana Ghiocel.
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/arkaim-russias-ancient-city-the-arctic-origin-of-civilisation
(picture of the hanging cliffs of the Red Canyon of Cyrenaica, Libya) (see the faces and animals in the rocks)
Why it’s time to embrace our Neanderthal cousins…
By Colin Wilson February 2011
My friend Stan Gooch spent his last years living on an old age pension on a caravan site in Wales. For a long time, his letters to me had revealed increasing cynicism and weariness, and friends who went to visit him – deeply impressed by the visionary scope of his books – were shocked to find him in an obvious state of indifference and discouragement. When tired of exchanging letters by ‘snail mail’, I offered to provide him with a computer; his reply was that he would never use it. It seems astonishing that this brilliant writer, author of more than a dozen books (some of them, like The Paranormal, classics in their field), should have been allowed to sink into the condition that the saints used to call accidia, but I suppose it has been the fate of many men of genius.
Now he has gone, perhaps Stan’s highly original work will one day be given the credit it deserves. Certainly, it seems that the safe, academic world he turned his back on is catching up with him, as recent findings appear to confirm some of his long-held theories about the sophistication of Neanderthal man.
CITIES OF DREAMS:
In 1999, I was engaged in pursuing an intriguing little problem. Charles Hapgood, best known as the author of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, had died as the result of a car accident that happened in December 1982. Two months earlier, he had written to a librarian named Rand Flem-Ath telling him that he had made “recent exciting discoveries” that had convinced him that there had once been a 100,000-year-old civilisation with “advanced levels of science”. And since I had agreed to collaborate with Flem-Ath on a book about Atlantis, I set out to pursue Hapgood’s contacts to see if I could find out what he meant.
Finally, through a tip-off from one of Hapgood’s acquaintances, I found myself in touch with an archæologist and science writer from New England, who staggered me when he declared that it was he who had given Hapgood this information. What he had told him, he said, was (a) that the Greek measure of distances proved that they knew the exact size of the Earth a millennium or so before Eratosthenes discovered it (around 250 BC), and (b) that Neanderthal man had a remarkable degree of culture, and was studying the stars by 100,000 BC or earlier.
Now, I had already stumbled on the information about the Greeks in a book called Historical Metrology by AE Berriman (1953), to which the historical researcher Henry Lincoln had introduced me. And the second assertion had been made by Stan Gooch in 1989, in a book called Cities of Dreams.
Gooch was arguing that Neanderthal man had possessed a complex civilisation, but that it was not a civilisation of bricks and mortar, but of ‘dreams’. That hardly seemed to make sense. Surely civilisation is our defence against nature? Dreams are not much use against a hurricane or a sabre tooth tiger.
Gooch launches his argument by comparing Neanderthal man with Native Americans, pointing out that in spite of their complex culture, the latter had no written language and built no houses. What would have happened, Gooch asks, if they had been exterminated by disease or some catastrophe, and had simply vanished? Archæologists would find their skeletons and dismiss them as ‘primitives’, just as we dismiss Neanderthals.
Speaking of the Seven Sisters, Gooch remarks: “The Pleiades are the only [star grouping] noted and named by every culture on Earth, past and present, from the most advanced to the most primitive”. He points out the similarity of the legends of Australian aborigines, Wyoming Indians and the ancient Greeks. In the Greek legend, Orion the Hunter pursues the six maidens and their mother through the forest, until Zeus takes pity on them, and changes them all (including Orion) into stars. In the Australian legend, the hunter is called Wurunna, and he captures two of the seven maidens; but these escape up trees that suddenly grow until they reach the sky, where all the maidens live forever. According to the Wyoming Indians, the seven sisters are pursued by a bear, and climb up a high rock, which grows until it reaches the sky.
Gooch goes on to mention that the Seven Sisters play an equally important role in the legends of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Polynesians, the Chinese, the Masai, the Kikuyu, the Hindus and the ancient Egyptians. This worldwide interest in the Pleiades, he argues, surely indicates that it originated in some very early and once central culture.
In Gooch’s view, that culture was Neanderthal. We may doubt this, and prefer to believe that it was our own ancestor, Cro-Magnon. But Gooch certainly had accumulated some impressive evidence of the intellectual sophistication of Neanderthal man. He speaks, for example, of a find made at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, where a 75,000-year-old bear altar was discovered in a cave. In a rectangular stone chest, whose lid was a massive stone slab, archæologists found seven bear skulls, with their muzzles pointing towards the cave entrance. At the back of the cave, there were niches in the wall with six more bear skulls.
Now seven is, of course, a number associated with shamanism. The Drachenloch cave was clearly a place of ritual – in effect, a church. Moreover, as historian of religion Mircea Eliade tells us, there is a worldwide connection between the bear and the Moon. And this might have been guessed from the fact that the number of skulls in the cave was 13 – the number of lunar months in the year. This, and many other clues, led Gooch to infer that the religion of Neanderthal man was based on Moon worship, and Neanderthals were the first ‘star gazers’. He argues that, among much else, the knowledge of precession of the equinoxes, noted by Giorgio de Santillana and Herta von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, probably originated with Neanderthal man.
A ‘church’ implies a priest or shaman, so Neanderthal man must have had his shamans, ‘magicians’ who played an important part in the hunting rituals, as shamans do worldwide. Is it chance that the Moon goddess is Diana the Huntress? Is she perhaps also a legacy from Neanderthal man?
NEANDERTHAL CULTURE
THE MYSTERIOUS ‘CARL’
Read more: http://www.disclose.tv/forum/a-100-000-year-old-advanced-neanderthal-civilisation-t49164.html#ixzz3ProOoLe6
–
Neanderthals were more advanced than us. THEY were one of the megalithic cultures of the remote past:
Geneticists confirm that the human genetic base bottle necked at one point during the last glacial period. WE lost most of our population and were reduced to a few thousand. That is a proven fact.
Neanderthals were capable of art, tool making, probably had language and also music. Everything we attribute to modern humans may have come from them. OR they may have shared with us in an act of conformity.
Could it be possible that we survived an extinction level event that killed off the Neanderthal population which was the more advanced form of sentient life on earth at the time? It is entirely possible for a biological threat to kill off our entire species and leave only primates to take our place. I propose a similar scenario. Not necessarily a viral threat that killed off the Neanderthals, but a combination of factors. Perhaps they were reduced to what they UNDERSTOOD to be a insufficiently diverse population to survive, so they chose to interbreed with the slightly inferior homo sapiens.
excerpt from “OPEN SCIENCE”:
The Neanderthals and Proto-Dravidian Civilisation-(An Oceanic
Origin for Rig Veda)
The increased prevalence of autism in the Dravidian Nair community has
been documented. Autistic children and the Nair population tend to have
Neanderthal anthropometric features. There is increased incidence of EMF,
CCP, MNG and mucoid angiopathy in the population inhabiting the island
masses of the Far East. The population that migrated from the submerged Asian landmasses, travelled over to the Eurasian land mass creating the urban civilizations of
Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt.
All these ancient civilizations were co-terminus and existed at the same point of time at
least 10,000 years BC. The Harappa-Mohenjadaro civilization is considered to
be Dravidian and the Harappan script has been decoded and found to be
Akkadian-Dravidian. All the Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque,
celts and Egypt civilizations spoke the Akkadian-Dravidian language. As has
been demonstrated the Dravidian Nair community has Neanderthal
anthropometric features and Neanderthal metabolonomics.
All the above mentioned civilizations have a possible Neanderthal origin. The Dravidian
community is postulated to have evolved in the sunken land masses.
The increasing growth of archaea in the ocean bed, leads to release of methane which
triggers catastrophic earthquakes in the oceans. This precipitates Tsunamis in
the Indian ocean and one of them would have destroyed the vast landmasses at the end of an ice-age, triggering a mass exodus. This would be the basis of the flood myths in history
There is cerebellar dominance in the Neanderthal phenotype leading
onto increased intuitiveness, quantal perception, spirituality, community spirit,
compassion, equality and feeling of oneness with the environment.
The decreasing availability of sunlight would
have contributed to the light skin colour of Neanderthals.
The archaea binds to the toll receptor
inducing HIF alpha suppressing mitochondrial function and increasing
glycolysis. The archaeal catabolism of cholesterol produces cholesterol
depletion and bile acid deficiency. Both these factors induce the metabolic
syndrome and insulin resistance leading to trunkal obesity and the Neanderthal
phenotype.
The Neanderthals, following destruction of the Asiatic supercontinent, would have migrated to Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt creating a
global Dravidian civilization. This civilization had a language, was spiritual, had gender equality and social equality. It was also a creative urban civilization
in Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt.
The Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt are
essentially Dravidian and neanderthalic. The Harappan civilization was thus
similarly neanderthalic and Dravidian. The initial inhabitants of Harappa were
the Asuras and they are the Dravidian Neanderthals. The Rigveda had a
Harappan origin. The principal God the Rigveda is Varuna- the God of the
Oceans.
Such a concept would have evolved only in a land mass surrounded by
oceans and in ocean travelers suggesting a neanderthalic Dravidian origin of
Rigveda. The Indus script has been deciphered and is supposed to be
logographic and of Akkadian-Dravidian origin. The Harappan civilization had
thus a language, Rigvedic religion, laws and was urbanized. The Harappan
civilization originated in and was made up of Neanderthal Dravidians migrating
from an Asian land mass. destroyed by Tsunamis (which resulted from mass-flooding, a consequence of the melting of the ice-age).
It was a sister civilization to the other Neanderthalic Dravidian civilizations of Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts andEgypt. It was part of the global Dravidian civilization.
The Rigveda includes concepts of battle between asuric neanderthalic
Dravidians of Harappa and the invading homo sapien Devas. The homo sapien
Devas had a different brain structure with predominant prefrontal lobe and
smaller cerebellum. They evolved out of Africa and HERV generation led to a
dynamic large prefrontal cortex. They were different phenotypically from the
asuric Dravidian Neanderthals. The asuric Dravidian Neanderthals were
cultured with language, religion, laws and social organization. The asuric
Dravidian Neanderthals were matrilineal. They were more gender-equal with
alternate modes of sexual behaviour. The asuric Dravidian Neanderthals were
social equal with a primitive type of communism. The homo sapien Devas did
not have a language, laws or religion and were relatively uncivilized. They were
more patriarchial and male dominant.
The homo sapien Deva invasion of the neanderthalic Harappan society led to the generation of Neanderthal hybrids and the hybrids got their religion and language as well as civilized behaviour from the Neanderthalic Harappan Dravidians.
The basis of human creativity can be related to this interaction between the Dravidian asuric Neanderthals and the homo sapien Devas. The Rigveda is basically of Dravidian neanderthalic origin.
The initial global language was Akkadian-Dravidian. The Sanskrit language is a
modification of the Akkadian-Dravidian script. The homo sapien Deva invasion
led to the collapse of the global Dravidian civilization of Harappa-Mohenjadaro,
Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt. The great religions of the world the
Judaeo-Christianity, Muslim and Hindu are basically Dravidian Neanderthal
and Semitic. The Dravidian Neanderthal community migrating out of the flooded asian landmasses, was the basis of the Semitic community and the Semitic religions of the world.
The Neanderthalic brain was attuned to quantal perception and spirituality.
In the present situation of global warming there is an increased growth of
archaea in the human system and neanderthalisation of humans. The
Neanderthals have returned and the human brain is becoming neanderthalic in
behavior and function. This is responsible for the rising tide of autism,
schizophrenia and metabolic syndrome x in the world.
The Harappa-Mohenjadaro, Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt are
essentially Dravidian and neanderthalic. The Harappan civilization was thus
similarly neanderthalic and Dravidian. The initial inhabitants of Harappa were
the Asuras and they are the Dravidian Neanderthals. The Rigveda had a
Harappan origin. The principal God the Rigveda is Varuna- the God of the
Oceans. Such a concept would have evolved only in a land mass surrounded by
oceans and in ocean travelers suggesting a neanderthalic Dravidian origin of
Rigveda. The Indus script has been deciphered and is supposed to be
logographic and of Akkadian-Dravidian origin. The Harappan civilization had
thus a language, Rigvedic religion, laws and was urbanized. The Harappan
civilization originated in and was made up of Neanderthal Dravidians migrating
from the flooded land-masses destroyed by Tsunamis. It was a sister civilization to the other
neanderthalic Dravidian civilizations of Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and
Egypt. It was part of the global Dravidian civilization.
The Rigveda includes concepts of battle between asuric neanderthalic
Dravidians of Harappa and the invading homo sapien Devas. The homo sapien
Devas had a different brain structure with predominant prefrontal lobe and
smaller cerebellum. They evolved out of Africa and HERV generation led to a
dynamic large prefrontal cortex. They were different phenotypically from the
asuric Dravidian Neanderthals. The asuric Dravidian Neanderthals were
cultured with language, religion, laws and social organization. The asuric
Dravidian Neanderthals were matrilineal. They were more gender-equal with
alternate modes of sexual behaviour. The asuric Dravidian Neanderthals were
social equal with a primitive type of communism. The homo sapien Devas did
not have a language, laws or religion and were relatively uncivilized. They were
more patriarchial and male dominant. The homo sapien Deva invasion of the
neanderthalic Harappan society led to the generation of Neanderthal hybrids and
the hybrids got their religion and language as well as civilized behaviour from
the neanderthalic Harappan Dravidians.
The basis of human creativity can be related to this interaction between the Dravidian asuric Neanderthals and the homo sapien Devas. The Rigveda is basically of Dravidian neanderthalic origin.
The initial global language was Akkadian-Dravidian. The Sanskrit language is a
modification of the Akkadian-Dravidian script. The homo sapien Deva invasion
led to the collapse of the global Dravidian civilization of Harappa-Mohenjadaro,
Sumeria, Etruscia, basque, celts and Egypt. The great religions of the world the
Judaeo-Christianity, Muslim and Hindu are basically Dravidian Neanderthal
and Semitic.
The Dravidian Neanderthal community migrating out of the flooded landmasses was the basis of the Semitic community and the Semitic religions of the world.
The neanderthalic brain was attuned to quantal perception and spirituality.
Inevitably, Neanderthals are one of the mythological advanced cultures always spoken of in oral traditions. There is always a reference in mythology to a first man, or several creations, of man as he is today, is only the last of in the series. ALWAYS the earlier versions are punished for being TOO MUCH like the gods. They had terrible qualities that led to their demise. They were always accredited with being very great in something or the other, seeing as the gods do, doing as the gods do, etc…
The megalithic structures, which are colossal by our standards, constitution and intelligence without advanced tools. Perhaps not so much so for a super strong, super smart and advanced humanoid as the Neanderthal.
The technologically advanced civilizations, of which only now, we are starting to come to terms with, consisted in part of Neanderthals, whom we know to have existed LONG before our version of man came along.
We are pushing the dates back to almost every single structure in the known ancient world. There are those that stubbornly resist, but science is showing that almost everything has a connection to a megalithic culture on a global scale. These cultures built these structures globally and did so employing either technology or knowledge that has escaped us for its lack of accurate transmission throughout the ages.
—-
References:
21-1-2013 by Zed V. Szardoz
Neild, Ted (2007). Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet.
Boston: Harvard University Press.
[3] Gooch, Sanley. The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient
Wisdom. Inner Traditions, Wildwood House, London; 2006.
[4] Gooch Stanley. The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural
Origins. Inner Traditions, Wildwood House, London; 2008.
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles … vilisation
‘Early civilisation on our planet’
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/Arkaim.jpg
This is a long article and I selected the most important paragraphs but be sure to read the whole thing!
Vast shadowy forces are moving in Central Asia – or rather in the greater region we call Eurasia – which may change the face of our global society and civilisation forever.
Even as the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting inexorably in favour of the Eurasian superpowers – principally Russia, China, the Central Asian states and India – a new spiritual wind is blowing out of Inner Asia and its many hidden mystical schools, promising to sweep the new entente into unprecedented heights of international power, politically and culturally. The immensity of the coming turbulence occasioned by this shift from West to East is incalculable, the outer symptom of a global revolution of consciousness.
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile, paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:
The entire surface of the earth is marked with the traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy. Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths. All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural forces across the entire earth.
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists, this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about 3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled. Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.
Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilization in southern Russia, confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.
Evidently Arkaim was a Wisdom Centre in a network of such Centres that once related all the prehistoric peoples of the earth to each other under the spiritual aegis of the Pillar religion and its priestly elites. The remains of countless similar stone circles, menhirs and troy towns are scattered throughout Europe, the Americas, Eurasia and the Pacific lands, memorials to great crisscrossing migrations of peoples, all loyal to the same axial principle that relates earth to the heavens.
The mystery of Arkaim is indeed the mystery of the Pillar religion. Who brought to all the primitive peoples of earth this knowledge of the Polar Axis, uniting them for many thousands of years in a common planetary culture? Who taught them the astronomical secrets of the solar system, the zodiac and precession of the equinoxes at a time in prehistory when human intelligence was not supposed to be evolved enough to have developed that knowledge alone? And what part did Arkaim play in that dissemination?
How long ago, or for how long, this circumpolar culture may have existed no-one knows: possibly 200,000 years or more. In The Interpretation of Radium, the acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated that some of the beliefs and legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be “evidence of a wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilisation of which all other relic has disappeared.”19 There may have been, he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world when civilised men lived “in a past possibly so remote that even the very atoms of civilisation literally have had time to disintegrate.
On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilisation with a highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in existence in the Arctic Circle.21 Until lately Hapgood’s finds, presented in Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958) and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), have been largely ignored in scientific circles, even though they elicited support from the great physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in them is mushrooming among a growing number of highly accredited investigators.
René Guénon appeals to the oldest and most authentic esoteric traditions in claiming that long before the Indo-European races arose, at a time when a hunter-gatherer humanity was still at a primitive stage of development, the tropics were differently distributed and a great Hyperborean culture flourished around the Arctic Circle, “in the Islands of the Blest on the shores of the Ocean where the great maelstrom whirls.”22
Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others, possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west. The latter has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded as the remains of what was once a great sunken landmass.23 (In support of this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola have long had a tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles, a well-known earthquake zone, were once connected by a single landmass, before a great cataclysm about 15,000 years ago submerged the connection and left only the known island fragments.)
Leaving aside Guénon’s oblique reference to the two southern refuges of the Hyperboreans being in Russia and Central America, he suggests that in both cases the two groups brought with them advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge and the seeds of arts and sciences that would eventually be passed on to our brute ancestors to become the basis, about eight thousand years ago, for our own civilisations.
Both Sumer in the Middle East and Central America have flood stories written down long before the biblical account of Noah’s flood, and in all these stories the salvific activity of the Elder race is pivotal. There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who “came from the east,” destroyed the earth in a great flood. Later, after a man and a woman survived by taking refuge in a floating box, “Virachocha recreated the peoples of the earth, and gave each one his own language and songs.”25 Wilson cites many such instances in which flood stories about the Hyperboreans and their salvation of our race are to be found in both the Old World and the New.
The Elders have been known as the Nephilim, the Sons of God, the Anunnaki, the Watchers and many other appellations; G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little more is known about them. Did they really exist? All that can be said with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence moving inscrutably in the background of virtually all the prehistoric traditions of our race.
The climate changed again around the ninth millennium BCE, which is widely regarded as the date of the demise of Atlantis and the enforced dispersal of its people both westward to Central America and eastwards to Europe. Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and coastal flooding to vast areas of the globe30 and a severe threat to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought another response from the senior race.
Although the Elders had gone, their dynastic descendants, a long line of neolithic priest-kings, began a new evolutionary programme. In their migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which Plato’s Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the Atlanteans. Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE, also from Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE.31 The Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body of wisdom originally centred on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know today, as well as all our higher learning. Its spread heralded the dawn of peaceful, egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in neolithic towns and villages around the world wherein the feminine principle was dominant and strife little known.
Arkaim and the Sun Gods
Modern historians have found that three great floods seem to have occurred in the known span of human history. According to Stephen Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah’s Flood and was the greatest of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium.33 It caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe earthquakes, and also desertification of the interior of the land masses, and civilization disappeared. Once again the species was threatened with a reversion to savagery, and once again salvation appeared from Inner Asia.
In the third millennium BCE, so the Chinese Celestial records tell us, the Sons of the Sun – also known as the Sons of Heaven – fanned out across the world from their homeland in the Karakorum Range at the western end of the Trans-Himalayas, bearing with them the higher revelation of the Sun religion.34 It was a patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilisation. Everywhere the stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the Pole Star, like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further thousand years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on the Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.
This innovation, however, was not without inter-faith warfare, since many ethnic groups, such as the Mongol/Turkic peoples of the eastern steppes, remained loyal to the Pole Star cult. At the same time, pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted as enmity grew for the powerful new faith. Indeed Arkaim may have been the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that period, and the fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after two hundred years of operation may well have been caused by that same internecine conflict between the old order and the new.
The pictorial evidence contained in the ‘Enuma Elish’ shows that the Sumerians understood full well that the Elders they revered so much were “from the gods” – not gods themselves but human beings, though far more advanced in consciousness. According to the murals they have left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race. The Solar priesthoods withdrew behind barricades, and a spiritual division opened up in society that had never before existed.
As the historian Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out in Hamlet’s Mill, from then on the enlightened understanding of our forbears began to descend into mythology and superstition as small pockets of secret wisdom called temples shone out in a sea of darkness, and a mystique of gods replaced the cosmological knowledge of an earlier age.35 While bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across the globe to sow the seeds of civilisation once more, a nucleus of the senior race withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia that surround the Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact with the outside world.
Ever since, the whole Eurasian heartland, from the Urals to the Gobi and including southern Siberia, has borne the stamp of a special sanctity. High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy Land and the Land of White Waters. Whatever its current name, almost all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this vast, mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge, to the legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the Ancient Wisdom for the present World Age.
From being hidden in shadows for thousands of years, today the region is being illuminated by an intense spotlight from every possible angle. The discovery of Arkaim is only one such angle. The highly publicised row between China and Tibet is another; the ever-worsening struggle between the US and Russia for military dominance over the oil- and gas-rich provinces of Central Asia; the increasing commitment of Russia, China, Iran and India to a Eurasian geopolitical bloc, in tacit opposition to the Western powers; and at the same time the awakening of interest in the West to the mysterious spiritual wealth that can be glimpsed in the place, are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia to the very centre of world attention. Yet the questions they pose remain unanswered.
What is the secret of the Holy Land? Who really were the Elders who gave us civilisation? Are they still guiding our evolution in discarnate form? What is the secret of the World Axis? Do we as yet understand the archetypal principles that shape our planet? And why are we only now beginning to ask such questions?
Stan Gooch & the Neanderthal Legacy
28 February 2011 By David Jones
(a Neanderthal girl-child)
By OANA R. GHIOCEL, M.A. & ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D.
—
On the 13th of September 2010, in a Swansea, South Wales hospital, an embittered and reclusive man, hailed as a genius by some, yet marginalised by many mainstream scientists and academics, passed away at the age of seventy-eight.1
In his later years Stan Gooch lived “virtually destitute” in “a rented caravan in a nearly abandoned Welsh trailer park – with neither telephone nor computer, his correspondence inked on the backs of galley proofs, and scarce personal contact – wholly lacking family, right at life’s raw edge.”2
This was the sad end for a man who made incredibly original contributions to our understanding of the origins and nature of our own humanity. Colin Wilson once wrote of Gooch, “It has seemed to me for many years that Stan Gooch is one of the most underrated writers of our time.”3 We agree with this assessment.
Born in 1932 among the slums of southern London to working-class parents, Gooch raised himself from his dreary surroundings, ultimately earning a degree in Modern Languages at King’s College, London, and a degree in Psychology at Birkbeck College, London.4 After spending time, between earning his degrees, variously working in the scrap metal business, teaching in Coventry (English Midlands), and serving as “Head of Department” in a London grammar school, in 1964 Gooch was appointed a senior research psychologist at the National Children’s Bureau. He wrote scholarly articles and coauthored books on psychology.
On the surface it seemed that Gooch was off to a respectable and potentially prosperous career.5 However, Gooch’s life would take a different turn, driven by his overwhelming interest in two subjects that on the surface might seem quite distinct, but for Gooch were intimately related: 1) psychical research (the paranormal, or what is now often referred to as parapsychology) and 2) understanding and reconstructing the mental and cultural world of Neanderthals and their bearing on modern humanity.
Ultimately Gooch gave up his secure position, turning down both the directorship of the National Children’s Bureau, and a professorship of Psychology at Brunel University, London, to pursue his research and writing full-time.
Unfortunately for Gooch, his books never had the mass appeal, with the concomitant income, he hoped for. Furthermore, psychical research is a subject that is viewed as fairly marginal at best by most academics, and Gooch’s conclusions concerning Neanderthal mentality and culture diverged so radically from the common conceptions of the time that mainstream scholars systematically ignored his work.
At the time of his death Gooch was depressed, bitter, and even angry that his ideas had not garnered the recognition that he felt they rightfully deserved. Perhaps he was ahead of his time, as many of his ideas about Neanderthals in particular are now being independently confirmed (although still generally without citing or crediting Gooch).
From the Paranormal to Neanderthals
While teaching in Coventry in the late 1950s, Gooch began attending weekly séances, his introduction to the paranormal. This sparked a deep lifelong interest in psychic phenomena. Moreover, Gooch found that he personally had telepathic and mediumistic talents. At one séance Gooch and the other members of the circle became aware of “a crouching, ape-like shape” in the corner of the room that “approximated to most people’s idea of what an ancient cave-man would look like.”6 After a while the figure faded away and the séance continued.
Nearly two decades later Gooch would write,
As regards the figure of the cave-man, which so very much impressed and haunted me both then and afterwards (in a wholly agreeable way, I must add) – I had [not] and could not have had any inkling that one day I would write books about Neanderthal man.7
Gooch summarised his own work during this period as
Looking always for further knowledge about the human condition, I was at the same time prospecting for a framework which could accommodate all the information that was accumulating.8
Ultimately Gooch developed a framework and theory of human personality in terms of dualities, such as unconscious versus consciousness, religion versus science, magic versus logic, dreaming versus waking. In his list are two key comparisons: psychic phenomena versus materialism, and Neanderthal man versus modern man.9
Gooch’s great insight was that while modern humans might manifest occasional psychic phenomena,10 Neanderthals “certainly possessed abilities in respect of the purely paranormal that far exceeded our own.”11 According to Gooch, we modern humans are literally the result of the dualities coming together, the biological interbreeding of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (that is so-called “modern humans,” Homo sapiens) and the melding of Neanderthal religious beliefs and cultural practices with Cro-Magnon societal elements even as Cro-Magnons may have come to physically dominate, and even apparently exterminate, the earlier Neanderthals.
The Neanderthal Question:
Who, or what, the Neanderthals were has been a much discussed issue ever since their remains were first recognised in the middle nineteenth century.12 The popular conception of Neanderthals is that of big-browed, short, stocky, stooping, grunting, ape-like cave men (and women) eking out a meagre existence during the harsh conditions of ice age Europe, the Near East, and Southwest Asia.
Classic Neanderthals in Europe date from around 130,000 years ago to perhaps as recently as 24,000 years ago in Gibraltar, but Neanderthal characteristics and antecedents are seen in fossil forms going back to perhaps half a million years ago or earlier.
In many people’s minds Neanderthals are a primitive side branch of the human tree at best, a totally separate species from us, that was driven to extinction by the more intelligent and better armed “Cro-Magnon Man” group (archaic Homo sapiens, essentially the direct ancestors of living humans) who progressively migrated from East Africa into Eurasia during the period of about 60,000 to 30,000 years ago.13
Stan Gooch had a very different view of the place and importance of Neanderthals – in Gooch’s view modern humanity is a result of the intermixing, both biologically and culturally, of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal elements. In his words,
A biological supernova occurred when Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal man met. We can, if we will listen, still clearly hear the echoes of that explosion and observe its after-effects… [B]ehind these echoes and tendrils we can also then detect the still fainter traces of Neanderthal civilisation itself, and hear the still fainter echoes of falling cities of dreams.14
According to Gooch, Neanderthals possessed an intricate, psychically-charged, magical culture.15 Neanderthals built a long-lasting “high civilisation of dreams.”16 Neanderthal culture, more sophisticated than that of the Cro-Magnons when they first arrived in Europe, served as a primary source for much so-called ancient wisdom.
Gooch argued that Neanderthals were the original creators, the innovators, of high culture, of symbolic values and religious sensibilities, which early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) copied and adopted without genuine understanding. Neanderthal culture was not a civilisation of high technologies, but one of the mind and spirit that survives today in our beliefs, myths, folklore, and religious practices.
Neanderthal Culture
Neanderthals developed in time a culture of the mind of a very high order, but also of a strangeness that is extremely difficult for us to imagine.
Neanderthals, according to Gooch, worshipped the cave bear, the spider, and the serpent – animals with whom they shared their caves. Neanderthals were the first humans to fully develop religious cults, and cave bear worship was their most significant cult. Neanderthals worshipped the number 13, associated with the moon and the lunar calendar, a number that is still considered magical today. Neanderthals developed a profound knowledge of crystals and minerals. According to Gooch, Neanderthals developed their own unique symbols, signs, and sophisticated language systems.17
Neanderthals weaved and sewed embroidery, wore jewellery, painted their faces and bodies, danced, had an elaborate mythology and cosmology, built stone circles, utilised sacred fires, and made ceremonial sacrifices. They had their own grand celebrations and feasts, which were spectacularly colourful and creative performances.
They worshipped the moon and other celestial bodies including constellations still worshipped today worldwide such as The Big Bear, Little Bear, and Draco (the dragon or serpent in the sky). Gooch asserted that Neanderthals had a strong religious life, based on an earth-magic religion, and they believed in the afterlife, practicing complex burial rituals.18
Neanderthals, as Gooch emphasised, were capable of great cultural innovations that included wearing jewellery and decorating their bodies and faces with colourful paints for special ceremonies. There is evidence that the sophisticated Chatelperronian culture of France belonged to the Neanderthals and not, as was formerly believed, to modern humans.19 This culture included symbolic artefacts, such as jewellery.
The Uluzzian culture in Italy, also now attributed to Neanderthals, is another example – an innovative culture that included a variety of very sophisticated tools that were similar to modern humans’ tools.20 Neanderthals in Spain were painting perforated shells for decoration, using pigments, and engaged in other ritual behaviour.21 As archaeologist João Zilhão, has stated,
The one thing these finds make clear is that Neanderthals were behaviourally modern. They were not like early modern humans anatomically, but they were cognitively as advanced or more so.22
In many ways Neanderthal culture and Cro-Magnon culture were diametrically opposed. Gooch wrote,
I believe the actuality of Neanderthal man – of whom archaeologists find only a handful of skeletons, a few altars, traces of ritualised burial, a range of flint tools, and an apparent knowledge of herbal remedies – was this: his was a moon-goddess-worshipping, matriarchal, food-gathering society, where women governed all matters. The only tasks delegated specifically to men were those where muscle power was directly and literally required, as in fighting, for example. The structure and nature of Cro-Magnon life was diametrically opposite. This was a patriarchal, hunter-warrior society, of which men governed all aspects, including religious life. Women were mere adjuncts in all things, whose main purpose was to bear sons and to comfort and care for the male. The supreme deity worshipped was the sun god.23
Gooch believed that Neanderthals were a mostly nocturnal species, and came out at night. Observing the skies and the moon for thousands of generations, they had become experts in all phenomena of the stars, having a great understanding of cycles and time, equinoxes and solstices, the phases of the moon.
Cro-Magnons would have come to know Neanderthal religion and knowledge initially through secret observation during 10,000 years (or more) of co-existence. When Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe they were shocked by the knowledgeable Neanderthals, and wanted the Neanderthal magic for themselves; so, they slowly and carefully spied on Neanderthals, copied them, and in the process stole all of their knowledge and wisdom, including writing systems and rituals.
The meeting of Classic Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe some 35,000 years ago was an immense culture shock for both parties… The two species were culturally opposite to each other in every way.24 At the purely psychological/cultural level,… Neanderthal dealt Cro-Magnon a culture-shock of such magnitude that its consequences are still with us today. Though it left little physical trace, there is in fact… not one aspect of our present lives, our attitudes and our institutions which does not today bear that ancient [Neanderthal] culture’s stamp.25
According to Gooch, Cro-Magnon was dazzled by the religious rituals, symbolism, cosmology, and deep intimate knowledge of the natural world the Neanderthals possessed.
Cro-Magnon took over all the ‘magic’ and ritual of Neanderthal for his own. But he took it over without any real understanding of most of it, and also with certain appropriate changes to suit his own world view, his own existing social structure, his own biological imperatives. He took over essentially empty forms, while losing the priceless content.26
The Cerebrum and Cerebellum:
The vertebrate brain includes the cerebrum and the cerebellum. In modern humans the cerebrum consists of the cerebral hemispheres that fill most of the skull. In humans the cerebellum is smaller than the cerebrum and situated at the back of the head tucked behind and under the cerebrum. Gooch points out that essentially the cerebrum and the cerebellum are two different brains (“we are each of us ‘in two minds’”27) that correspond to two different ways of approaching the world (“Two Brains – and Two Universes”28). The cerebrum is associated with “logical” and “rational” thinking, versus the cerebellum is associated with “dreaming” and “magic.”
[T]he cerebellum… is responsible for trance states, for dreams, for telepathy, for psychic healing, for spontaneous wounds, for poltergeist phenomena, and all other such matters. It is also the source of and the impetus for religious belief.29
Here we have the anatomical/physiological explanation for the duality of human personality. The Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal brains both consisted of larger cerebrums and smaller cerebellums, but the Neanderthal brain had a much larger and more powerful cerebellum than that found in Cro-Magnons. The more developed Neanderthal cerebellum gave rise to their “high civilisation of dreams.”30
Neanderthals developed a deep understanding of the natural world, but they did not necessarily do so in the rational, logical, “scientific” manner that modern humans have come to expect and accept. “I think that they [the ancients, Neanderthals]” Gooch stated, “obtained their knowledge not logically and scientifically but intuitively.”31
Hybridisation Between Neanderthals & Cro-Magnons
The taxonomic status of Neanderthals has long been debated. Were they a species distinct from modern humans? Even if they were a distinct species, could they have interbred with our species, at least to a limited extent?32 Or were Neanderthals simply a subspecies or variety of our own species? Is the grouping of fossil forms currently labelled “Neanderthals” actually a collection of different types of humans, perhaps different species or varieties or races? Gooch believed there were several different varieties of Neanderthals, separated geographically and temporally, in Europe, Africa,33 the Middle East, and Asia. Furthermore, a key point of his thesis is that Neanderthals, at least some Neanderthals, could and did interbreed with our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons.
In recent decades it has become apparent that human diversity tens of thousands of years ago was much more complex than previously believed. Some 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, for instance, there may have been half a dozen or more distinct species of humans inhabiting Earth. Besides Cro-Magnons (archaic Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Eurasia, in what is now modern Indonesia there was the diminutive “hobbit” form Homo floresiensis34 as well as apparently the last remnant populations of Homo erectus.35
In southern Africa were found the Boskop people, Homo capensis, reputedly with brains 25 to 35 percent larger than those of modern humans.36 In Siberia about the same time there was another population of humans, who may have been a species distinct from those listed above (though perhaps most closely related to Neanderthals), at present simply referred to as the “Denisovans.”37 To add to the list, the indigenous aboriginal Homo sapiens populations of Australia and New Guinea may have been relatively isolated for the last 50,000 years or more.38
Leaving aside at this time the issue of the numerous other human species (how they interacted with one another, and what contributions they made to the modern human lineage, remain open questions), Gooch believed that aggressive and battle-skilled Cro-Magnons both massively exterminated some populations of Neanderthals and also interbred with them. He wrote,
The genetic crossing of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal produced not just (a) highly gifted individuals (‘the mighty men of old, the men of renown’) but (b) an entirely new species of human – ourselves…. [T]his new product was… either entirely or very largely due to Cro-Magnon men fertilising Neanderthal women – not the other way around. These offspring would have been accepted into Cro-Magnon groups…. And so Neanderthal genes were introduced into the Cro-Magnon gene pool…39
This was a radical, unconventional view – to believe that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals interbred and therefore Neanderthal genes should still be found among us. However, recent studies of the Neanderthal genome reveal that today an estimated 1% to 4% of the modern Eurasian genome appears to come from Neanderthals.40 That is, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons must have interbred. Gooch’s ideas appear to be corroborated! (As an aside, we can also point out Gooch suggested that at least some Neanderthals may have been redheaded, another prediction since corroborated by modern science.41)
Gooch also asserted that Neanderthals never fully went extinct, writing,
[A]ctual Neanderthals at this very moment in time – that is, now, today – still survive and live at the edges of our civilisation…42
Gooch cites, for instance, the research of anthropologist Myra Shackley, who tantalisingly suggests that the legendary Almas (“wildmen”) of the Caucasus and Outer Mongolia may in fact represent relict Neanderthals.43 In one famous account a female Almas was captured in the nineteenth century. She was described as having skin of “a grayish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere… She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a ‘fierce expression’.”44 She sounds very much like a Neanderthal! First kept for some years in a stone enclosure, she later was kept in a cage, and finally in a house. She learned to obey simple orders and used branches and stones as tools. She became pregnant by her captors and while her first several infants died, she subsequently gave birth to two sons and two daughters who in turn produced children of their own via mating with other humans. This is all in line with Gooch’s hypotheses concerning Neanderthals. Note that the “primitive” state of the Almas may be because they are relict populations who have degenerated from the Neanderthal prime of 50,000 or so years ago.
The Neanderthal Legacy
The Neanderthals left us a lasting legacy, one that remains an undercurrent of modern human psychology, society, and culture. It is important, even critical, to understand this Neanderthal legacy – and the work of Stan Gooch may provide the fundamental key to unlocking the secrets of the Neanderthals.
We are personally further exploring, testing, and developing Gooch’s ideas concerning Neanderthal culture, including through first-hand study of the evidence, such as sites visited and used by Neanderthals. Thus during the summer of 2010 we mounted a small expedition to Neanderthal territory, including caves where Neanderthal remains have been found, in the Bucegi Mountains region of Romania. Rather than hypothetically reconstruct Neanderthal lifestyles and modes of thinking purely intellectually, our aim is to actually experience (as much as possible) what it was like to have been a Neanderthal. Future potential research includes attempting to reconstruct Neanderthal rituals and cave usage, for instance. This may be a tall order, but we are sanguine about the prospects.
We will close with a final tantalising note on the life and death of Stan Gooch. At the end of his last book, Gooch writes
The number thirteen figures centrally in my work because it is the most important number of the moon religion [according to Gooch, the religion of the Neanderthals]. And it just so happens that I was born on June 13 [1932]. And the day, it just so happens, was a Monday. And Monday is, of course, Moon Day.45
Gooch died on 13 September 2010, which also just happened to be a Moon Day. “Well, well, well…” (as Gooch himself might have written, 46).
Books by Stan Gooch:
Total Man, Allen Lane, 1972.
Personality and Evolution, Wildwood House, 1973.
The Neanderthal Question, Wildwood House, 1977.
The Paranormal, Harper and Row, 1978.
Cities of Dreams (subtitle on the cover of the 2001 paperback edition: When Women Ruled the Earth), Aulis Books, 1995, reprinted 2001.
The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals: Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom, Inner Traditions, 2006.
The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, Inner Traditions, 2007.
The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins, Inner Traditions, 2008.
Footnotes
1. Anonymous, “Stan Gooch 1932-2010”, posted at http://www.aulis.com/index.html (Accessed 23 October 2010); Geoff Ward, “A Sad End for Reclusive Writer Stan Gooch”, posted 26 October 2010, http://www.suite101.com/content/a-sad-end-for-reclusive-writer-a301122 (Accessed 20 November 2010).
2. Brent Logan, “An Urgent Appeal to Help the Acclaimed Author, Stan Gooch”, posted at http://www.brentlogan.net/sg/stan_gooch.htm (Accessed 8 June 2009).
3. Colin Wilson, posted 11 September 2007 under the title “Colin Wilson writes about me”, posted on a Stan Gooch blog at
http://www.myspace.com/stangooch/blog/308876837
(Accessed 9 June 2009); for other comments by Wilson on Gooch, see for instance: Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals: 100,000 Years of Lost History, Rochester,