9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Common Sense Prevails!, May 31, 2008
This review is from: The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins (Paperback)
The Neanderthal Legacy is a fine synopsis on Gooch's life long work concerning the prehistoric existence of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples and the consequences of their encounter in Europe 35,000 years BP (before present).
Stan Gooch's past pronouncements that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interbred resulting in the dynamic but unstable `hybrid vigour' of modern people have been validated by continued evidence from various sources; but this common sense scenario has been stubbornly rejected by Orthodox science.
Gooch on the other hand has consistently offered multi-faceted evidence from not just anthropology, but also modern physiology and the psychology of a wide range of myths and legends and from history itself, that indicates not only the fusion of two dramatically different strains of genes but also the wholesale subjugation of Neanderthal's matriarchal empire; the Christian devil for example is none other than Neanderthal.
This violent repression of Neanderthal by Cro-Magnon has an all too eerie familiarity about it that makes joining the dots a relatively simple task (the manic and almost successful attempt by the Nazis to eradicate Jews, Gypsies and Slavs), but Gooch's insights are extraordinarily plentiful; for example, the enlarged head of present day babies brought about by the cross breeding is the only part of the body that seems to be an unnatural size for the birth canal.
His narrative is aimed at providing students with research material and probing questions to be asked of their lecturers to highlight the lack of discussion and silence with regard to many of these issues. The condescending manner therefore is aimed at the establishment and its array of so called experts!
Since his towering masterpiece Total Man was published in 1972, each subsequent publication has been like the fitting out of a stained glass window, adding further illumination to the solidity of that initial structure (imagine Beethoven's ninth symphony as his first).
Total Man has recently been republished along with several other books by Gooch, it is important that they continue to be republished as, ironically, some of those so called experts are claiming his insights for their own.
So The Neanderthal Legacy is a welcome addition. It is a good starting point for a fresh generation of readers but any of his following titles are well worth reading:
Total Man; Personality and Evolution; The Neanderthal Question (these first three formed a trilogy); The Paranormal; Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom (now republished as The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals); The Double Helix of the Mind; The Secret Life of Humans; Creatures from Inner Space (now republished as The Origins of Psychic Phenomena); Cities of Dreams (also republished).
If however you wish to be stupid, confused and gullible; then continue with Martians, God and the da Vinci Code.
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10 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ranting Pseudo-Anthropology, May 20, 2008
This review is from: The Neanderthal Legacy: Reawakening Our Genetic and Cultural Origins (Paperback)
My first reading of Stan Gooch was THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA and I enjoyed that book very much. The style was engaging & the material thought-provoking. His latest book is THE NEANDERTHAL LEGACY and somewhere something went terribly wrong. Here the author's style is strident, argumentative & defensive. He treats his own anthropological speculations (the emphasis is on speculation) as literal & true fact that academics & us poor readers (he insists on calling us "students") are too dense to understand without his constant condescension & repetition.
It's offensively pedantic.
Not only this, but he is constantly interjecting his tiny kernels of insight with EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!! Everybody knows (well, just about everybody) the excessive use of !!!!!!!!!is like waving your hands about, shouting LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME!!!!
The core of his argument is that modern man is the by-product of a genetic mix of Neanderthal & Cro-Magnon populations. Not only is this idea not original, it's science (that evil institution so despised by Gooch and other New Agers) is as false as the idea itself. There was a relatively brief time around 30,000 BCE when the two species uneasily co-existed during the last Ice Age. There may or may not have been inter-breeding. Gooch bolsters his argument by invoking the Old Testament. Certainly Neanderthal women were not the beautiful "daughters of man" that attracted the Cro-Magnon "sons of god." What little in-breeding that MAY have happened (the Cro-Magnon males must have been pretty drunk to find a Neanderthal female hot) would be--and is--totally negligible in terms as human genetics today, cancelled out by many tens even hundreds of thousands of years. Cro-Magnon DNA is similar to ours because we are directly related to them. There has never been & never will be such a link to Neanderthal--because they were a different species.
As for Gooch's claim that Big Foot & other such mythical creatures prove his hybrid thesis, well...
The author claims to have discovered the Neanderthal source of the religious instinct--the menstrual cycle. This is more interesting & would have been original--had it not been commented upon by prominent occultists in the 19-20th centuries--not to mention the more esoteric forms of Hinduism.
Stan Gooch arrogantly waves aside all branches of thought that disagree with his own--and you better watch out if you do disagree with him, you'll find yourself on the author's ideological hit list along with "the board of the Royal Free Hospital, the Catholic College of Further Education, the New Scientist, the Spectator...we should get rid of all of them..." Page 69. This sounds like the ravings of a paranoid psychotic.
Despite his claims to higher consciousness, Gooch apparently finds nothing distasteful with scientists whose work seems to validate his own pet theories: "...Dr. Bernard...a psychic healer, Oscar Estebany, produced significantly faster healing in experimentally wounded mice..." Page 92.
Now that's real barbarism, "experimentally wounding" as in torturing animals to prove some crackpot theory. My goodness, me thinks I can hear knuckles scraping the floor from that lab...
On page 112 Gooch drags out the thoroughly debunked "Spontaneous Human Combustion" theory and, of course, presents it as an established fact. Why he felt compelled to wrest that old chestnut from the fire is anyone's guess. It makes no sense no matter how you look at it.
Politically Gooch is a frustrated reactionary. He lumps all leftist-progressive types into the left-handed (i.e. sinister group.) The right wing is symbolized by right-handedness. Simplistic to the extreme, but again students should just shut up and uncritically accept the Gospel according to Gooch.
I call the author reactionary because his core argument implicates the left as belonging to the Neanderthal (i.e. lesser race) group, and the right wingers to the more advanced Cro-Magnon.
"Steadily increasing Neanderthalism--socialism--in Britain has led to...a significant rise in level of crime, in cheating and double-dealing...one-parent families, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies, the dumbing down of education...known and dangerous terrorists...so-called asylum seekers...are given a lifetime of free housing..." Page 126
So now we see the author's real agenda--but wait, there's more:
"My own view, of course, is that if large numbers of pedophiles were examined, they would show a higher incidence of left-handedness (just as do lesbians and homosexuals)...a higher incidence of the simian line--and so on for all the other Neanderthal characteristics we have listed earlier." Page 130
Got the picture?
This is nothing more than back room Eugenics dressed up in the grave clothes of ageing New Ageism, another Crusader Against the Scientific Establishment and The Evil Red Menace.
"One of the many outcomes of this situation, as we cannot stress too often, is the emergence and ever-growing dominance of the left-wing political movement, of left-wing thinking. Communism and socialism are...the Neanderthals' view of the universe." Page 135.
The author sandwiches this ridiculous rant in a chapter claiming that the Great Sphinx is a Neanderthal image and consequently must be 10's of thousands of years old. We won't even bother to go there.
Gooch concludes his diatribe with Appendix 3, a seven page self-serving, self-aggrandizing listing of his good reviews.
Obviously we won't be on the next list.
Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense against Health Scares and Scams
Quack!: Tales of Medical Fraud from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
Homophobia : A Weapon of Sexism/Includes Afterword and Annotated Bibliography
Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price
Homophobia: A History
Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism
Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us
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