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- Aug 10, 2005
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There are a couple of relevant Threads:titch said:... gooch seems anything but harmless and i am surprised that so many readers seem to be able to agree with or at least ignore some of his more disturbing theories.
I am sorry for saying this here,the only other gooch thread i can find is his rip thread and i do not think it would be appropriate to put down my thoughts in there.
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8756&highlight=neanderthal
And to a lesser extent:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7154&highlight=neanderthal
Weird as Gooch's theories may seem, they have been part and parcel of the 'Fortean experience', for several decades. I really don't think that Gooch's theories are dangerous, so much as they now seem to inhabit a strange, old-fashioned, New-Age, hinterland, somewhere between Robert Grave's 'White Goddess' and Frazer's 'Golden Bough'. His work tried to turn the then conventional wisdom on its head. When Gooch started writing, Neanderthals were still being written off as brutish sub-human also rans.
I read some of his books very long ago and I saw him at the 2003 UnCon. His lecture seemed sadly out of touch and old fashioned, but, as has been pointed out, elsewhere, modern advances in palaeontology and DNA research, haven't thrown his theories out of the ring entirely. There may yet be wheat discovered, hidden amongst the chaff.
I may hive the relative Gooch related posts of onto their own Thread. P_M