with Dr. Andrew Welburn

We could think of Neanderthals as primitive brutes, hairy and lurching, not real people but prehistoric forerunners of humanity. A fl ood of discoveries has led to a re- evaluation. We now know they were large-brained, upright, articulate human beings who wore clothes and lived in complex societies. We ourselves are all part Neanderthal, as they married up with other humans migrating out of Africa at the end of the Ice Age. This new picture is related to the account of evolution given by Rudolf Steiner, concerning a human stream coming out of Africa and interacting with another stream at the very beginning of post-Atlantean times. They may have helped establish the balance of faculties that enabled human beings to develop threefold society which includes the taking of individual initiative; working together and sharing values. By ‘doing’ three folding today we may rightly claim to be evoking the human creative patterns of interaction that go back to the Neanderthals and to the Palaeolithic Revolution, in ways which are being rediscovered in the most unexpected manner.

Dr. Andrew Welburn has been an academic in the fields of English Literature and biblical interpretation and history. A life-long anthroposophist, he has written several books on Steiner’s philosophy, esotericism, and Christianity, and on the prophet Zarathustra.