Adam and Eve: When and Where?

In recent decades we’ve needed people who can work out how a high view of the Bible’s reliability coheres with contemporary cosmology and biology. Now, arguably, we particularly need Christian geneticists; because advances in human genetics and its detailed mapping of our race’s past have raised significant questions as to where Adam and Eve, and the flood, as described in Scripture, fit in!

(Note: This is an extended post.)

Obviously posing the question like that assumes two important things. One is that, in the light of passages like Luke 3:38, Romans 5:12-19, 1 Corinthians 15:21 and 45-47, 1 Timothy 2:13-14 and 1 Chronicles 1, Adam is a literal, historical individual.(1)  The other is the general accuracy of the current scientific consensus about the age of humanity.(2) (Of course `young-earther` believers don’t accept that and hence don’t have the problem this article addresses(3); in my personal opinion they face other major ones, but that is not our topic here!)

This article arose from a desire to help with the apologetics issue. In writing it, however, I’ve become aware how much fascinating stuff is being discussed in this area which deserves the attention of much wider audiences.

A Neolithic Adam?

Where might Adam and Eve fit into our race’s history as understood by the current widespread scientific consensus? Two proposals seem dominant.

One is that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of all true human beings, in the far distant past (that definition begs two huge questions, but we’ll explore them below). Or secondly, that the creation of Adam and Eve happened either in or just before the neolithic period, when God created a supernatural change of consciousness in a single pair of people from among the many thousands of humans alive at that time, including the knowledge of himself, and transformed them into beings such as we are today. (Here is Denis Alexander’s phrasing of this: `God in his grace chose a couple of Neolithic farmers in the Near East, or maybe a community of farmers, to whom he chose to reveal himself in a special way, calling them to fellowship with himself – so that they might know him as a personal God.`(4)) This new consciousness then spread throughout humanity because of Adam’s `federal` (rather than literally ancestral) `headship`, analogous to the `federal headship` of Christ. And then what Genesis 2 is describing is a God-created change in Adam and Eve’s consciousness that may well coincide with the human race’s huge psychological leap in the neolithic, including the transition from hunter-gatherers to more settled farming communities. Alexander presents this transition as commencing around 10,000 BC. (5)   This suggestion can perhaps be seen as building on Victor Pearce’s proposal that the humankind created in Genesis 1 are old stone age (palaeolithic) hunter-gatherers, and then Adam created by God in Genesis 2 is separate, and agriculturalist/new stone age/neolithic.

This idea may seem strange if we have always been accustomed to the idea that Adam was the first homo sapiens. The first thing to say, however, is that it clearly isn’t incompatible with a strong belief in the reliability of Scripture. We find it cautiously advanced in his Genesis commentary by Denis Kidner, the writer of several superb commentaries in the Tyndale series that have been so important for evangelicalism; again, by Denis Alexander, whose articulate defence of theistic evolution Creation and Evolution is surely (whatever you think of theistic evolution) the best we currently have, and is strongly inerrantist; by charismatic father-figure Roger Forster, whose Reason, Science and Faith is to my mind a greatly underused apologetics classic; by Tim Keller in an excellent essay on https://biologos.org/articles/creation-evolution-and-christian-laypeople/ (6);

and indeed it goes back at least to John Stott’s Understanding the Bible (1972), and you can’t get much more evangelical than Stott! But – much more important – it may well seem to explain some enigmatic details in Genesis. As Keller writes,

This approach would explain perennially difficult Biblical questions such as – who were the people that Cain feared would slay him in revenge for the murder of Abel (Gen 4:14)? Who was Cain’s wife, and how could Cain have built a city filled with inhabitants (Gen 4:17)? We might even ask why Genesis 2:20 hints that Adam went on a search to ‘find’ a spouse if there were only animals around? In [this] approach, Adam and Eve were not alone in the world, and that answers all these questions.

It should be said that, if we believe that Adam was created by God many millennia earlier, but nonetheless in a world that contained many not-quite-human but humanoid, pre-adamic creatures(7), that would answer Keller’s questions equally well. (So for example the city or gathering-place that Cain founded could well have been inhabited by human beings who were not capable of what God created in Adam; indeed since Genesis doesn’t speak of any other cities in that era, it could be that it would take a being equipped with whatever new consciousness was involved in Genesis 2 to give the leadership or shepherding necessary to bring these beings together.)  But I would want to add another passage, Genesis 4:26 – `At that time` (when Adam’s grandson was born) `people began to call on the name of the Lord.` Does this imply that there were `people` up to that time who did not have the capacity for responsive awareness of God which was basic to what God created in Genesis 2, and was now spreading to the rest of humanity?

It is also true that some profound and remarkable change in human consciousness occurs with the neolithic era, compared to all the preceding millennia in which little progress was made. For a vast amount of time, palaeolithic humans seem to have made few technological advances; but then suddenly we have the birth of agriculture, and in a relatively short time (compared to the palaeolithic era) the discovery of a great deal else, with civilisations appearing around the world (`as if the peoples of the world woke up all at once`!) Alexander notes that the gold, onyx, bronze and iron referred to in Genesis 2:11-12 and 4:22 would have been `of little interest to [palaeolithic] hunter-gatherers`.(8) It is certainly tempting to see what God did with Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 as causative to all that, and spreading (somehow) to the entire human race. (It is interesting, however, that Alexander sees this as happening within the neolithic era (`perhaps around 6,000-8,000 years ago`), rather than precipitating the neolithic developments.)

It’s a fascinating idea. However it seems to me to involve a number of snags.

1. The first two come straight out of the text. As John Lennox points out in his brilliant Seven Days That Divide The World, Genesis 2:5 explicitly says that before Adam’s creation in v7 `there was no man to work the ground`.(9) It’s difficult to reconcile this with Alexander’s view of Adam and Eve being part of an already-existing community of neolithic farmers, unless we see this verse as referring purely to Eden and its surroundings; or alternatively we may see Adam and Eve as immediately pre-neolithic
2. But then there’s Genesis 4:20, describing Cain’s remote descendant Jabal as `the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock.` Doesn’t this sound as if the neolithic-sounding `settled farmer` (rather than hunter-gatherer) lifestyle of Cain and Abel had somehow got lost, until Jabal’s time?
3. Third, more subjectively: for Alexander what is happening in Genesis 2:7 is essentially a spiritual birth; indeed (he adds) there may have been `no physical way of distinguishing between Adam and Eve and their contemporaries`, just as today on the streets of Cambridge (he adds) there is no physical sign of who has spiritual life and who does not.(10) To this I can only say that, for me personally, the change in v7 (`The Lord God…breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being`), coming where it does in this cosmically-significant narrative, reads as something much more ontologically dramatic than that. The planting of the garden by God himself, the naming of the animals, the whole business of the nakedness and God himself needing to clothe them, and the apparent physical changes of 3:17-18 (even if they don’t extend beyond Eden itself), suggest that we have something much bigger here, more of a huge step and much more far-reaching, than just a neolithic couple being given the capacity for a new relationship with God.
4. Related to that is another point Lennox makes: when Scripture describes God revealing himself to someone, his history-shaping intervention into the life of Abram for example, it uses language like `The Lord appeared to Abram`.(11) In contrast, the language of Genesis 2:7 clearly describes a creative rather than revelatory act. (We might respond that what God is doing in Genesis 2 is creating a capacity to receive his (subsequent) revelation in a way that never existed before. But I wonder how that works if – like Alexander(12) – we say that pre-adamic humans had a religious sense `as people sought after God or gods in different parts of the world` : can any human being have a religious sense unless, in some way, it is a response to God’s revelation (see for example Romans 1:19-20)?)
5. Then there is the puzzling question of how this full `humanness` spread from Adam to all the other humans around the world.   Here the crucial concept is that of Adam being created by God to be the `federal head of the whole of humanity` (13), so that the transformation God made in him spread somehow to the whole of humanity, no matter how distant.   This notion draws of course on the federal headship of Christ, depicted (arguably) as paralleling Adam’s in Romans 5; the transference of new life through Christ’s federal headship does not depend on physical descent. But as Michael Reeves demonstrates(14), in the Bible `headship or corporate nature is never portrayed as being detachable from real connections`. And although Christ’s federal headship in Romans 5 does not depend on physical descent, it actually flows from an even deeper bond, our being `united with` Christ (Romans 6:5), brought into his Body so that from then on we are actually `in Christ` (Ephesians 1:1-13 throughout).   But the fact is that, if we want to affirm a neolithic Adam, some hugely miraculous `federal` transference of humanness has necessarily to be invoked to explain how this `humanness` transferred to populations across the atlantic in places with no contact at all with the middle east; or, say, to the south African Bushmen. Perhaps it is surprising that Genesis is entirely silent about such a wonderful thing?We may also wonder how much is implied about all these races being physically descended from Adam and Eve – that is, from a couple dating far earlier than the neolithic – by Eve being described as the `mother of all living` (Gen 3:20 (15)), and by Paul’s remark (Acts 17:26) that `From one man [God] made every nation of men?On all this, however, see our next main section on the possibly game-changing nature of Swamidass’ research.
6. But there is another problem with the `federal headship` theory. The `full humanness` created in Genesis 2 might somehow have spread to all races worldwide by a miracle of divine grace, but that’s not all that was going to happen. `Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin… One trespass resulted in condemnation for all people… Through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners` (Rom 5:12,18-19). So a neolithic Adam’s federal headship means that faraway races suddenly start sharing his guilt, and its penalty, spiritual death. That might make some sense had Adam been a global emperor whose rebellion could reasonably be judged as speaking for the whole race, but there is no evidence, biblical or otherwise, for any such thing. As Michael Reeves says, `There is here no basis for a connection between Adam and the homo sapiens at the other end of the earth from him`, and so `God’s imputation of sin` (in this scenario) `to the unsuspecting Australian aboriginals just looks arbitrary`(16) – or much worse, because what has now resulted for them from the events in Eden far away is, Romans tells us, nothing short of coming into a place of divine condemnation. (Alexander admits that this is a significant problem with his theory.(17)) Nor is it easy to see how the prevalence of death – even if (like myself) we see this as referring to spiritual death – among, say, the aboriginal Australians, would have changed dramatically (`Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin`) because of what happened in Eden. What changed?
7. And then: dating Adam and these fairly major events only 6000-8000 years ago means that for example the farmers Alexander describes on p.230 from 9000 BC, and the townsfolk of 8000 BC (18), were radically different in spiritual terms from us human beings since Adam. When we learn that `sin entered into the world through` Adam, we’re clearly learning that there was something fundamentally different in terms of moral consciousness between Adam and his predecessors and contemporaries. But for myself it’s hard to locate that change as late as 8000 BC; it’s hard to understand that there was nothing we could call sin in the consciousness of paleolithic humans who, Alexander asserts firmly, were made in the image of God, and indeed (and archaeology seems to confirm that he’s right about this) had a religious consciousness, and much besides (19). `Sin entered the world through` Adam – but the palaeolithic people seem so human. Can we believe that these pre-adamic people were not aware of sin? (But if they already were, why does Adam and Eve’s disobedience about the fruit matter so colossally much? Perhaps because of its cost in terms of their direct communion with God (3:8)?)
8. Three final problems. One is the flood: if the flood wiped out all (true) humans apart from Noah and his family, that has to have happened before (for example again) the aboriginal Australians left the rest of the human family, and it’s believed that they reached Australia by 50000 BC; in which case a date for the flood, and therefore, Adam, after 50000 becomes impossible. Now it is true that many of us see the flood as regional rather than global(20), but I suspect most would also see passages like Genesis 6:6-7,13, as teaching that the entire human race was wiped out by it (21), either because humanity hadn’t spread beyond that region or because of the flood’s associated tsunamis etc. So if we want a neolithic adam, we have to reread Genesis 6 to 9 and decide if we can take this further step and accept that these chapters are compatible with much of the human race being untouched by the flood.(22)
9. Then, Genesis 2:20b: Adam finding `no suitable helper` does make a lot more sense if the potential partners who prove unsuitable are pre-adamic humanoids, but without his massive consciousness shift. (We can imagine Adam looking into the eyes of a potential partner (just as a believer might do today!) and realizing that that vital spark of spiritual life is simply not there.) It’s hard to see this verse as recording how Adam finds to his surprise that he can’t mate with a giraffe or a rhino! And yet for me this passage doesn’t work quite so well if we see it as set in neolithic times, applied to neolithic humans so very similar to ourselves yet lacking (for that moment) Adam’s new consciousness. And it’s a little hard to see how the `bringing and naming` of 2:19 can refer to such almost-human contemporaries (rather than to earlier humanoids who were far less human).
10. One final snag that bothers me, though it may not bother everyone: it does seem odd that it should be not just the first true humans, but the first true believers, the first ones given by the wondrous grace of God to `share in the very life of God… who put their trust in God by faith` (23), that are presented as above all the ones who wrecked the world; their spiritual new consciousness and new birth was an utter catastrophe, not just for them but in bringing condemnation and death to every continent, no matter how distant and unconnected. There might be something bizarrely ironic here if the glory of being the first to meet with God and receive some kind of `new birth` should have such tragic consequences.

Interlude: Josh Swamidass

To me, then, there are a whole series of issues with the neolithic Adam concept that may not be decisive but are at least problematic. But before we move on to the alternative, it’s worth taking note of the possibly game-changing research of Joshua Swamidass, a physician and genome scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

One criticism atheists make of Genesis is that, if contemporary genetic evidence is even remotely accurate, there is no way the entire human race can be descended from a single couple unless we go back to the very distant past – and arguably even then we are looking at an ancestral population of several thousand.

But first, Dr. Steve Schaffner, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ran a simulation to determine whether a bottleneck of two individuals was possible. He found that, at dates older than 500,000 years ago, a bottleneck could not be ruled out. Swamidass then separately demonstrated that `the most recent time at which a bottleneck of two individuals, or four alleles, could have occurred was about 500,000 years ago… This is a big deal. The original claim that we had to come from a population of thousands is wrong, because there are dates past which we cannot tell if there was a bottleneck of two. The work of Schaffner and Swamidass has opened up the possibility of a first pair.` (24) Indeed Swamidass wrote later `If Adam and Eve were about 200 thousand years ago, it might be possible they were the genetic progenitors of Homo sapiens, as long as their offspring interbred with other hominids like Neanderthals.` (25)

But then Swamidass did some further research that went a lot further.(26) `He draws on simulations published in Nature in 2004 by Douglas Rohde, Steve Olson and Joseph Chang showing that just a few thousand years ago many individuals must have existed who are genealogical ancestors of all present-day humans. Swamidass makes the simple suggestion that one pair of the shared ancestors of all living humans was “Adam and Eve”.` (27)   What he has pointed out is that our entire race can be descended genealogically from a single couple, that is, we would all have them among our ancestors, without that showing up genetically, because we have so many other ancestors. So then it is scientifically possible for a single couple to be ancestors of each member of our entire race within, say, 10,000 years.

Now obviously, while this would make Adam and Eve the ancestors of all of us, they would be very far from the sole ancestors of all of us; their descendants would not be direct physical descendants of Adam and Eve alone.  (Which is why genetic evidence would show no sign of a sole ancestral couple.) But biblically this is not a problem.   A good parallel is Hebrews 11:12, speaking of Abraham as the father of the Jewish people, which says that “from this one man [Abraham], and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore”; yet nonetheless Scripture records a great deal of interbreeding with other races. (28) (Swamidass notes that ` all major camps in the creation debate (including Reasons to Believe and Answers in Genesis) allow for intermixing between Adam’s lines and others, and no historical creed or confession denies this option.`)

In short, Swamidass argues that `when we think about ancestry genealogically rather than genetically, it is possible that all humans existing by the time of Jesus` [or, let’s say, by the time Paul spoke Acts 17:26] `are descended from a pair existing only a few thousand years before. He also makes the case that this couple could have been created de novo and have descendants interbreeding with the surrounding population.` (29)

And this is not just a position dependent on Swamidass’ faith (and it is worth noting that he is comfortable with modern evolutionary theory). Nathan H. Lents is a professor of biology at the City University of New York and (as he states clearly) a non-believer in Adam and Eve, and he writes, `[Swamidass] and I teamed up on the pages of Science to rebut claims by evolution critics. In addition, [Swamidass’ book] The Genealogical Adam and Eve went through a rigorous process of open peer review, involving scholars from many diverse disciplines and even some secular scientists, including myself and Alan Templeton, a giant in the field of human population genetics. Invited to find fault in his analysis, we couldn’t, partly because the hypothesis is so narrow, but also because it appears to be correct. Surprising though it seems, it is scientifically tenable that, among our billions of other ancestors, we could all be descendant from a single human couple who lived in the past 10,000 years. In fact, as Swamidass carefully explains, this is almost certainly the case according to current estimates of the so-called identical ancestors point, a time in the past when all family trees converge into one common pool of universal ancestors… According to Swamidass, Adam and Eve could have been a special creation whose progeny slowly interbred with the human population that already existed outside the Garden of Eden — people who had descended through the normal evolutionary process… The “seed of Adam” could easily spread to all of humanity over thousands of years, and this universal ancestry would leave no genetic footprints…` (30)

Swamidass himself is motivated primarily by a desire to show that there is no need for Christians (or others) who believe in the full reliability of Genesis to feel (or fear) that there is an irreconcilable clash between that confidence and contemporary science: `As traditional theology holds, we can all descend from a de novo Adam` [ie, a special creation] `in our recent history. As evolutionary science indicates, we can all share ancestry with the great apes` [because of our other ancestors]. `Both these things can be true at the same time. They are not in conflict.` (31) Therefore, says Lents, `As long as one reads the book of Genesis in a way that allows that the evolutionary tree of life existed alongside the Garden of Eden, and that humans derive their ancestry from both sources, modern science might actually be silent on the issue of Adam and Eve. The effect of this new realization is that Christians, Jews and Muslims can effectively move the Adam and Eve story from the column of miracles that science has soundly disproved — such as a recent global flood — to the column of miracles that science cannot disprove, like the virgin birth of Jesus.` Which also means, as atheist biologist Jerry Coyne notes, that the narrative of Adam and Eve no longer represents a major question-mark for anybody over the credibility of Christianity; he wrote for the jacket of Swamidass’ book, `I am one of the many scientists who have maintained that the existence of Adam and Eve as ancestors of all people on earth is incompatible with the scientific data. In this book, Joshua Swamidass effectively demonstrates that people like me, stuck in a specific genetic paradigm, were wrong… I failed to appreciate the biblical ramifications of this fact.` For all of us, this hopefully means that – with some at least of our not-yet-Christian friends – we can spend our time talking about Christ crucified rather than getting stuck on Adam and Eve!

Both of these are very significant developments. For our purposes in this article, however, it’s also a development that can make sense of how through `federal headship` (if we still want to call it that) the consequences of both what God did in Genesis 2 and the fall in Genesis 3 could have spread to all humanity in the fairly recent past.

But, as is argued above, there remain a number of other difficulties with this `neolithic Adam` approach. So what’s the alternative?

An Archaic Adam?

Many of us, like myself, have probably worked with the impression (rather than the proposal above) that Adam and Eve were ancestors uniquely of the human race as a whole, but without giving or needing to give any thought as to when that might have been. Here then is the second possibility: Adam and Eve were indeed the unique physical ancestors of all true human beings, but in the very distant past when `true humans` first arose. The prime attraction of such an early dating is of course that these archetypal events and their consequences – God’s dramatic creative action in Genesis 2, and the equally significant consequences of the Fall – are now the ancestral prehistory of all true humans.

But as we said above, that definition begs two huge questions: first, what does `true human` mean? And when do we first find these `true humans`?

Here the waters get very murky indeed, because human beings before the neolithic era made numerous different steps forward (new types of tools, cave art, body ornamentation, etc), albeit slowly. Anthropologist Dean Arnold writes that `As near as we can tell, modern human cognitive and cultural capacities developed very late in the hominid sequence. They were in place by the Upper Paleolithic Period in Europe (about 35,000 BC at the latest), and seem to have a solid biological basis in the human brain. The Upper Paleolithic thus seems to be a likely beginning for the “embodied image of God”… The relatively sudden appearance of a new and unique kind of culture in the Upper Paleolithic (without clear antecedents in many cases) supports a Christian view of the uniqueness of modern humans and their relatively “sudden” appearance. The evidence to support such points, however, is very controversial among paleoanthropologists and Upper Paleolithic archaeologists.` (32) Swamidass writes that `Denis Lamoureux identifies theological humans of about 50,000 to 40,000 years ago with behaviorally modern humans. Hugh Ross, Fazale Rana, and Greg Davidson identify humans with Homo sapiens and y-MRCA and m-MRCA at about 100,000 years ago. Without providing specific dates, C. John Collins suggests milestones such as language and knowledge of moral law.`(33) Hugh Ross’ `old earth` ministry Reasons to Believe says that `the oldest archeological evidence of humanity (tools, religious artifacts, etc.) dates back around 80,000 years ago. Second, scientists have found fossilized human remains with ages in the 100,000-year range. Third, genetic dating using molecular clock analysis of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam yield dates between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. The consistency of these three independent lines of evidence instills some confidence that Adam and Eve lived somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago.`(34) Kathryn Applegate notes that one of two main views among her fellow `evolutionary creationists` at Biologos takes things further back still, holding that `Adam and Eve lived among a few thousand people at the “headwaters of humanity,” perhaps 200,000 years ago in Africa.`(35) (The neolithic hypothesis is the other one.) And globally respected apologist William Lane Craig suggests that `Adam and Eve may… be plausibly identified as members of Homo heidelbergensis` (also known as `archaic homo sapiens) `and as the founding pair at the root of all human species` sometime before 500,000BC, in which case this founding pair would be the common ancestors of Homo sapiens, Denisovans, and Neanderthals. (36) Ann Gauger of the `intelligent design` Discovery Institute goes for a time further back still. (37)

What shall we say to all this? How far back can we conceive of Adam and Eve?

Our first reaction may be one that is I think more emotional than realistic, that is, that these are impossibly large gulfs of time. But I’m not sure if this objection has any concrete force. It may seem a vastly long time for a handful of narratives to be handed down orally from generation to generation; Kidner queries the likelihood of `names and genealogical details` being passed on over such a span.(38) But we have very little idea what palaeolithic story-telling would have been like, except that it probably would have happened, and these would have been their most sacred and carefully-repeated narratives. (Palaeolithic humans don’t seem to have been much into creating novelty.) Actually, the most complicated things involved are probably the names of the ten most revered or else notorious ancestors, and the age at which they had a child, which evidently mattered (for whatever reason) to that culture (Genesis 5); there may of course have been famous story-cycles linked with each of these ten and making them important that are long lost to us.

The main objections to this proposal arise, it seems to me, from the biblical text. The first is geographical. Applegate writes, `I have difficulty with scenarios that locate a non-Homo sapiens first couple in the ancient past (i.e., more than a few tens of thousands of years ago)… The setting of the Garden near the Tigris and Euphrates (modern-day Iraq) would seem to be at odds with the African origin of humanity as pictured by current science.` And the geography of Genesis 2:10-14 does at first sight seem middle-eastern.  However there is something of a geographical problem with what the author meant by the four rivers in these verses, whatever we do; there simply are not two other major rivers with their sources near those of the Tigris and Euphrates.(39)   But there is another fascinating possibility: can it be that Eden was in Africa, where contemporary anthropology sees humankind as having arisen, and the geography of Genesis 2:10-14 – Tigris, Euphrates and Asshur – was originally African geography? And later, people migrating to the middle east out of Africa named newly-encountered geographical features after the rivers in their most hallowed and `golden-era` ancient stories? (Just so, a British visitor to Nova Scotia will find a Halifax, a Liverpool, a Truro and an Aberdeen, but `all in the wrong order`!?- named after places in Britain from which the early settlers came.) The fact is that the river Gihon in Genesis 2:13 `winds through the entire land of Cush`, and Cush normally refers to Africa. (40)  It is interesting that, as Alexander says(41), `Nowhere in the rest of Scripture do we find people looking for the Garden of Eden`; that might possibly be because a tradition had been handed down that it was, in fact, very far away?

(Two minor snags with this idea: the present tenses of Genesis 2:11-14 are a difficulty, but they may reflect the wording of a pre-flood record – the race’s most sacred narratives – handed down carefully and unaltered from generation to generation. Also, Eden is described in 2:8 as being in the east; but if the context of Genesis 2 is of God stepping into a situation where there are already pre-Adamic hominids whose widespread habitat is Africa, then `east` would mean east Africa, which fits the anthropological record.)

Geography, then, is not a major obstacle to the idea of an `archaic Adam`. Another snag, however, is that the things that Adam, Cain and Abel learned about agriculture (Gen 2:15, 3:23, 4:2-3), and that Cain’s line later discovered or rediscovered (4:20), seem unknown to palaeolithic humans, and sound very like the marks of a neolithic lifestyle.(42) However, there does seem to have been something about the brains of pre-neolithic humans that made them extremely slow to make (therefore also to retain or copy?) any cultural innovation.  So it might not be surprising if, although God had revealed agriculture to Adam, after Cain it was forgotten. Indeed God’s words to Cain in 4:12 `The ground… will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth` might imply a relapse into the hunter-gathering lifestyle. And as we noted above, Genesis 4:20 describes Cain’s remote descendant Jabal as `the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock`: doesn’t this sound as if the neolithic-sounding `settled farmer` (rather than hunter-gatherer) lifestyle of Cain and Abel had somehow become lost, until Jabal’s time?

Then there is also the mini-renaissance including metal-working in Genesis 4:22. We could see this (and therefore the flood) as within the neolithic period; if however we feel that Genesis 6 places these in a more `archaic` era, with the flood wiping out the entire human race and Genesis 10 recording the repopulation of the whole earth (cf 11:9), then in 4:22 we are looking a very long way back; and so it becomes an issue that the skills described there have vanished entirely from the palaeolithic record. But once again we have to reckon with the human beings of (for example) 60,000 BC being extremely slow to make (or retain?) any cultural innovation. So it would be unsurprising that, if the advances of 4:20-22 had happened c60,000 BC, they might well have been a source of enormous wonder to whoever handed the stories down (rather like how the achievements of the `ancients` in the Roman Empire were recounted with wonder in the so called `dark ages`), but without having been understood, copied or adopted widely at all beyond a small group. Furthermore, if this `renaissance` was shortly before the flood (quite possible as it comes at the end of chapter 4), the actual knowhow of these advances may well have been unfamiliar to Noah’s family, who may have been geographically distant and knew them only by hearsay, and therefore couldn’t make use of them after the flood – or perhaps even saw them as dangerous because of their connection with Cain’s line, and with wicked humans whose way of living had precipitated the flood catastrophe?

Lastly: a more challenging set of issues, if we place the rise of `true humans`, the flood and the human race’s dispersal in the archaic past, arises with the building of cities, of Babel and of the cities in Genesis 10:10-12. This certainly doesn’t sound very palaeolithic. As for the city-building in 10:10-12, we may certainly view that as neolithic, even if we have an archaic Adam; the city names there seem to be presented as belonging within not too distant history, as do vv5 and 15ff. (But that means chapter 10 is summarizing a period of many millennia, including both a flood in 10:1 early enough to have wiped out the whole race on the one hand, and Cush’s `descendant` the neolithic city-builder Nimrod a very few verses later on the other; and the Canaanites a few verses later still. It’s possible.) But there is a bigger problem with the Babel events and the massive dispersal that followed. We have either to say that it is not our entire race that is being dispersed in chapter 11 – but are we comfortable fitting that with v1, `The whole world had one language and a common speech`, and the apocalyptic feel of v9, `There the Lord confused the language of the whole world`? Or else, if chapter 11 describes a (necessarily archaic) dispersal of the entire human race, and since that is the result of Babel, then the Babel events likewise have to be archaic. (Which means they are completely separate events from the apparently similar city-building in chapter 10, preceding those by many millennia. But that separateness should be obvious: the city-building in chapter 10, unlike chapter 11, is multiple and successful. Nimrod, it seems, started out by building his Babylon on the remains of primeval Babel.)

If however the Babel events are indeed archaic rather than neolithic, we do face the issue that there are skills at work that are otherwise alien to palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. But again, all such skills might very well have been lost in the confusion after Babel, whenever it happened. A small group of people `scattering` across the land might very well not have retained the skills the innovative city-builders had. (Imagine a small group today fleeing from some huge catastrophe, a nuclear war let’s say: how likely is it that their children would be able to recreate, say, electric devices? And we have no reason to think that the Babel generation had the ability to commit their expertise to writing.) But we may also wonder what was involved in the impulse from God to `scatter` and fill the earth. There is after all a curious question here: what on earth possessed (for example) the aboriginal Australians, given what we know about their culture and lifestyle, to begin (as is generally agreed) the astonishing trek from Africa or the middle east and continue it till they reached Australia, including somehow crossing the sea? And what impelled the Inuits (`Eskimos’) and Siberian tribes to head into such inhospitable environments as their homelands? There was not exactly a huge population making it necessary for everyone to seek a distant living-space. And a literal reading of Scripture offers an answer: somehow `the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth` (Gen 11:9), so that his purpose might be fulfilled of the earth being `filled` (Gen 9:1). But if there was some God-given mental impulse in the brains of humans in the millennia after Babel driving them to be continually on the move(43), it’s obvious that the skills both of farming and of city-building would have lost their value, since next year the tribe would be aiming to be on the move again; not wishing to settle down with agriculture, but reverting to a hunter gatherer existence, until the real neolithic period began.

All this is highly speculative. My point is simply that there seems no conclusive reason why Adam should not be dated in the distant past, with the origins of all true humans. (It would, of course, falsify this possibility if there were anywhere in Africa where we can absolutely prove complete continuity by the very same race from very early times, and if this rendered impossible any break for, say, 500 years between the flood and resettlement of that area after Babel.)

Two Other Issues

It will be noted that neither of these positions necessitate a particular stance on evolution (44), although proponents of a neolithic Adam tend to be evolutionary creationists. Likewise, both positions can cohere well with the idea that the world outside Eden was already corrupted, courtesy of the fall of Satan, and that Eden was envisaged as a special, divinely-created bridgehead from which (as from God’s bridgehead in the church now) a whole new order of goodness could flood out into the surrounding disharmony, bringing it to new life. (Ezekiel 47 might offer a parallel from the other end of history.) This idea doesn’t arise merely from the viciously carnivorous creatures we find in the geological record. Isn’t Scripture hinting that there is already a problem in the world outside Eden?  Is that why the military-sounding word `subdue’ is used for part of the humans’ task (1:28)?  Indeed, in what sense can there be a `garden’ if the entire environment is a paradise?  So then it seems to have been Adam and Eve’s perfect local environment, not the whole planet, that was changed, wrecked, in 3:17-18.

However, two other issues are worth noting with regard to the coherence of the biblical record with contemporary genetics. Firstly, it seems generally agreed that all of us alive today have an ancestry dating back, on the female side, to one woman in Africa long ago (a `mitochondrial Eve`, as she has inevitably been labelled), and on the male side to one man (likewise labelled a `Y chromosomal Adam`). This is not to say that this woman and man were the only humans – or hominids – alive in their day; there were many others, but all other lineages have died out, so that this woman and man are the ancestors of all people alive today.(45) This does not necessarily mean we could see them as the biblical Adam and Eve. For a long time current thinking – which is all we have in any of this – was that these two lived many millennia apart, our female ancestor or `mitochondrial Eve` living 150,000 to 250,000 years ago, and our male ancestor or `Y chromosomal Adam` in a very different era, 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Indeed this has led to the suggestion that, while the female genetic trail might converge only with Eve (since the survivors of the flood had three different female ancestors in the ark), perhaps the `Y chromosomal Adam` was in fact Noah, since all survivors of the flood were descended from him. However the Reasons to Believe site says that `Now, based on better estimates of mutation rates for mitochondrial DNA, use of larger regions of the Y chromosome, and inclusion of rare Y chromosome variants, the dates for mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosomal Adam converge around 150,000 years ago`. (46); which would seem to leave open the possibility of these two being the biblical Adam and Eve, the couple in whom God chose to create something radically new, foreseeing that they and they only, among all the contemporary hominids, would eventually end up as (or be left as) the progenitors of everyone who would follow?  Maybe – we need more Christian geneticists!

The other interesting question concerns the flood. An advantage of the `archaic Adam` possibility is that it allows a very distant dating of the flood, and perhaps one matching a genetic bottleneck around 70,000 BC. There is a fascinating possible coincidence between the biblical flood (perhaps regional but nonetheless impacting the entire few-thousand-strong (47) human race), and a current theory that there is a genetic bottleneck where the human race was reduced to a tiny number of individuals, from whom all of us are descended. (This has arisen from research showing that modern humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species.) There is for example a theory that, around 70,000 years ago, a catastrophe occurred, possibly linked to a volcanic explosion in Toba, Sumatra, as a result of which the human population dropped drastically in size and for a few years teetered on the brink of extinction, before growing again in the stone age(48): `The Youngest Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 70,000 years ago, which may have resulted from a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate….It is supported by some genetic evidence suggesting that today’s humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.` (49) But we might well wonder whether this shrinkage was somehow connected with the flood.

Now there are obvious snags here: current science may see the human population at the bottleneck dropping to the thousand breeding pairs postulated here (although some geneticists speak of as few as 150-200 individuals), but that is rather more than the three breeding pairs in Genesis 9! But the potential coincidence is intriguing. One might speculate perhaps whether whatever unique and miraculous event happened at Babel (an event so massive that it may be almost the only event recorded from tens of thousands of years of prehistory?) may have had not merely linguistic but also genetic aspects; in other words the rate of genetic as well as linguistic variation could have been supernaturally multiplied? (It’s also intriguing that Steven Ambrose, a proponent of the theory of the Toba eruption as a cataclysm, states, `One consequence of [this catastrophe] may have been rapid differentiation of small, isolated African immigrant populations into modern human races. `(50)   Or, of course, a flood followed by a Babel event creating `rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations into modern human races` might possibly have accomplished that…)

Maybe, maybe, maybe. These are speculations offered merely for others to improve upon or falsify. But clearly there is no reason for us to fear the coming of an irreconcilable clash between Genesis and contemporary (and, let’s remember, rapidly-changing) genetic science. But we do need Bible-loving geneticists!

(Note: Genesis is of course not given us only as history, but also and primarily as a  -fascinating! – guide to how we come to be where we are today, and what it’s vital that we learn from our first ancestors – in the primal temptation of Genesis 3, for example. For more on how massively relevant and illuminating Genesis 3 and 4 are to our predicament now in the postmodern west, see my other posts on these chapters, in Bible intros 1-2.)

—

1 See https://www.bethinking.org/does-evolution-disprove-creation/adam-and-eve . See also, from a different perspective, R J Berry in https://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/serve_pdf_free.php?filename=SCB+23-1+Berry.pdf .

2 Presupposing, in other words, that the ages in the Genesis 5 genealogy cannot simply be added together to give us a date for Adam 6000 years ago; because if we look at other biblical genealogies, it’s obvious they don’t set out to give complete father/son lists, since people included in one genealogy get missed out in another. Thus `became father of` (Gen 5:6 etc) should be better translated `became ancestor of`, as per the NIV margin; as they recorded this, Noah’s family just looked back to and recorded their most significant ancestors. (And let’s not be bothered by the length of these lifetimes – these people lived closer to unfallenness than we do, which may have had all sorts of physical implications. Actually the Greek old testament recalls even longer ages; and for what it’s worth the Babylonian list of kings (i.e., of significant figures) before the flood has average ages of about 30,000 – and some Hindus even say that people lived to 60,000 in the age before this one!)

3 For a young-earth perspective on the issues raised by contemporary genetics, see https://answersingenesis.org/adam-and-eve/genetics-confirms-recent-supernatural-creation-adam-and-eve/ .

4 Alexander, D. Creation or Evolution: do we have to choose?, Oxford: Monarch (2008), p.236.

5 ibid, pp.230-31.

6 We should note that Keller, while cautiously adopting Kidner’s neolithic hypothesis, sees both Adam and Eve being brought into being by special acts of divine creation. See also http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/2017/09/08/the-creation-of-adam/

7 The idea of pre- or co-Adamic man goes back at least to the books of Rendle Short, the (Brethren) professor who played an absolutely key role in the emergence of IVF/UCCF. I’m intrigued by the judgment of Genesis 6:3 if the ESV translation is accurate, `Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever”; might this just possibly mean that God’s Spirit had not been in pre-Adamic humanoids, and that this could recur?

8 op.cit., Alexander, p.241.

9 Lennox, J. Seven Days that Divide the World, Grand Rapids: Zondervan (2011), p.73.

10 op.cit., Alexander, pp.237-38.

11 op.cit., Lennox, p.72.

12 op.cit., Alexander, p.237.

13 ibid, p.237; Kidner, D. Genesis, London: Inter-Varsity Press (1967), pp.29-30.

14 Michael Reeves, `Adam and Eve`, in Nevin, N (ed) Should Christians Embrace Evolution?, Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press (2009), p.53.

15 Although Kidner (op.cit., p.30) sees this as an ambiguous verse.

16 op.cit., Reeves, p.53.

17 op.cit., Alexander, p.275.

18 ibid, pp.241,231.

19 ibid, pp.237-38. Kathryn Applegate who takes the neolithic line describes her own view thus: `Thriving cities existed when Adam and Eve lived. Art, trade, tools, language, and farming were familiar to their contemporaries. The people of that day bore God’s image, for it was bestowed on them when God brought them into being, and they were already engaged in subduing the earth. Yet they knew him not and did not call on his name, though perhaps they were seeking God and reaching out for him (Acts 17:27).` (https://biologos.org/articles/why-i-think-adam-was-a-real-person-in-history.)

20 The Bible simply doesn’t make clear how widespread or regional the flood was. Personally I suspect Bible teachers like Tim Keller are right to suggest it was regional, whatever part may have been played by tsunamis etc in bringing God’s judgment on the entire human race. (And then the building of the ark and gathering to safety of the animals become prophetic acts, a final vivid warning from God.) If Keller and others are right, it deals with most questions sceptics ask, like how all the animals fitted into the ark, or how the tinier marsupials got back across the sea to Australia, and the South American sloth to its habitat. It’s true that 6:7, 6:17,8:21 and 9:15 sound global; but we have to remember humans were sent to be God’s `regents`, and the flood need not have extended beyond the `subdued` area where that regency was real. A verse like Genesis 7:19 can be speaking of either `mountains` or `hills`, and `all` in 7:19-23 has to be read in the light of Psa 22:17, Matt 3:5, Deut 2:25, Gen 41:57; the word `eretz` translated `earth` in 6:17 or 7:3 is elsewhere translated `land` (1476 times) or `country` (140 times) or `ground` (96 times). (See for example Gen 41:56-57, Ex 10:5, Num 22:5, 2 Sam 15:23 and 18:8, 1 Kings 4:34 and 10:24, 2 Chron 36:23.) We should also compare the way Luke 2:1, Acts 2:5 or Col 1:23 speak of `all the world`, or `every nation under heaven`, when both Luke and Paul knew full well they’re referring only to their own, Roman world, and that there were nations outside the Roman empire. (I’m drawing heavily here on Roger Forster and Paul Marston’s Reason, Science and Faith (London: Monarch (1999)), pp.296ff; but see also www.godandscience.org/apologetics/localflood.html.) Bernard Ramm in The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Exeter: Paternoster (1955)) observed that while obviously God could have created a global flood, for the highest mountains in the whole world to be covered would need eight times the amount of water we now have, and no such miraculous creation of water is recorded, nor is the miracle that would have been needed to remove so much water; nor is the absolutely massive recreation of life that would have been necessary of all the fresh water and salt water life destroyed by the mixture of the two, and the `entire world of plants` destroyed by the enormous pressure of water six miles high, the salt water, and the year’s soaking. And then there are all the issues with the animals, for example the sloths and the Australian marsupials being brought across the sea, and back again; and the sheer number of animals involved – surely too many for the ark, unless we believe in an incredibly rapid evolutionary diversification of species since the flood, again very much contrary to the geological record.   Some animals will have needed a very moist environment, others a very dry one, both in the ark and in the massive journeys across continents to and from it; some will have needed very cold environments, others very warm. More and more miracles become necessary, and it grows increasingly bizarre that Scripture doesn’t say that all this was going on.

21 Besides the biblical material, the sheer quantity of flood stories right across the world is a strong argument for this. Stephen Caesar, in https://biblearchaeology.org/research/chronological-categories/flood-of-noah/4083-a-localized-flood , gives a great summary of how races all over the world have had flood stories. (Or for a mindbogglingly thorough compilation, try talkorigins.org/pdf/flood-myths.pdf . `Only in Africa are they noticeably rare`, says Kidner, op.cit., p.95.) However, Caesar concludes that this shows the `entire world must have suffered a devastating flood`; surely it could only show that our entire race suffered a devastating flood.

22 Personally I would find that conclusion exegetically difficult. However it is at least arguable that the list of races in Genesis 10 describes only the races in or near the middle east; is that list intended to be exhaustive?

23 op.cit., Alexander, p.237.

24 Ann Gauger writing in https://evolutionnews.org/2018/03/is-there-a-first-human-couple-in-our-past-new-evidence-and-arguments/

25 https://peacefulscience.org/three-stories-on-adam/

26 He gives a good summary in https://peacefulscience.org/genealogical-rapprochement/ ; for more detail see https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2018/PSCF3-18Swamidass.pdf , http://peacefulscience.org/three-stories-on-adam/ and the articles linked to there. Subsequently Swamidass has presented his ideas at book length in The Genealogical Adam and Eve, Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press (2019). There are interesting reviews of this on, and linked to by, https://biologos.org/articles/series/book-review-the-genealogical-adam-and-eve/genealogy-genetics-and-the-power-of-words . See also Jon Garvey, The Generations of Heaven and Earth, Eugene: Cascade (2020), and William Lane Craig’s debate with Swamidass on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhznTACRjSU#action=share.

27 Richard Buggs, https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/61200-adam-and-eve-our-ghostly-ancestors.

28 David Opderbeck writes, `It seems to me potentially very significant for our conversation about Adam that people who were not physically descended from Abraham were included in the Biblical genealogy of redemption that derives from “one man,” Abraham. They were grafted into the Abrahamic line by marriage. Is it likewise possible that the universal genealogical line of “Adam” could include the in-grafting of physical lines of descent outside of Adam’s direct line, with “Adam” still remaining the progenitor with representative responsibility for the resulting mass of humanity? Once again, the Bible itself seems to have no problem with this possibility… just as Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and others infused non-Abrahamic genetic material into the Abrahamic line… Even if some of Abraham’s genes remained in the first century Jewish gene pool, because of intermarriage, there would have been a great deal of genetic diversity from people outside of Abraham’s line, including Canaanites, Moabites, and others. Indeed, the Bible itself tells us that the Israelites repeatedly intermarried with surrounding people, often to their great detriment, as when King Solomon catered to the idol-worship of his foreign wives (see 1 Kings 11:1-6). Non-Jews—people who according to scripture itself were not physical heirs of Abraham—were considered by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew to be part of the Abrahamic line of redemption, to the point of being included in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: Tamar and Rahab, both Canaanite women, and Ruth, a Moabite woman. And Rahab is even mentioned again in the “Hebrews 11 Hall of Fame” (Heb. 11:31). So how can the writer of Hebrews suggest that the Jews came from “one” (or “one man”) when in the same passage he mentions a Canaanite woman who was not a direct descendant of Abraham? What about the progenitors of the Canaanite and Moabite family lines of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and of many other non-Jews who married into Abraham’s line over the centuries?` (https://biologos.org/articles/a-historical-adam.)

29 John Collins’ summary in https://biologos.org/articles/series/book-review-the-genealogical-adam-and-eve/theological-response-to-joshua-swamidass-the-geneological-adam-and-eve .

30 Nathan H Lents, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/04/upcoming-book-leaves-scientific-possibility-existence-adam-eve-column/3826195002/ . Lents notes also that `Swamidass acknowledges the undeniable scientific truth that the human population evolved from ancestor ape species and shares common descent with all living things. He is a defender of, not a dissenter from, modern evolutionary theory.` (Interestingly, I see the BBC website ran a piece in 2012 by evolutionary biologist Yan Wong answering the question ` How many generations does it take before someone alive today is a descendant of everyone on the planet?`, which concluded, `How far do we have to go back to find the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today? Again, estimates are remarkably short. Even taking account of distant isolation and local inbreeding, the quoted figures are 100 or so generations in the past: a mere 3,000 years ago.` https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19331938.)

31 Swamidass in https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-de-novo-creation-of-adam-and-biologos/107

32 https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2006/PSCF12-06Arnold.pdf

33 http://peacefulscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PSCF3-18p19-35Swamidass.pdf

34 https://reasons.org/explore/publications/rtb-101/age-of-adam

35 https://biologos.org/articles/why-i-think-adam-was-a-real-person-in-history . Cf also https://biologos.org/articles/series/old-earth-or-evolutionary-creation-a-new-book-shows-fruits-of-multi-year-dialogue/where-are-adam-and-eve-in-the-story-of-evolution-four-possibilities

36 See Craig’s recent book In Quest of the Historical Adam, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (2021); also https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/josh-swamidass-on-adam-and-eve-part-1/ and https://peacefulscience.org/wlc-genetic-challenge/   This might be particularly interesting if clearer evidence emerges of `truly human` characteristics among Neanderthals, art for example.

37 https://evolutionnews.org/2020/01/reflections-on-our-ancient-past/ .

38 op.cit., Kidner, p.28.

39 There is a point of view that these were four rivers that had a confluence now drowned under the Persian Gulf. See Hugh Ross https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/read/tnrtb/2011/02/28/lost-civilization-beneath-the-persian-gulf-confirms-genesis-history-of-humanity. (However, in a 2013 article Fazale Rana from the same group speaks of human beings originating `in a single location (East Africa, close to where theologians believe the Garden of Eden was located)` (https://reasons.org/explore/publications/rtb-101/read/rtb-101/2013/04/04/rtb-101-post-9-age-of-adam.) Also on the Persian Gulf hypothesis see, from the 1980s, http://ldolphin.org/eden .

40 However, Kidner op.cit. p.107 argues that it can also refer to the Kassites, living east of Assyria.

41 op.cit. Alexander, p.258. He is making a different point.

42 Cf op.cit., Kidner, pp.27-28.

43 The Times ran an intriguing piece by Tom Whipple on 9 August 2019, mentioning that whereas anthropological orthodoxy had been that homo sapiens emerged from Africa 60,000 years ago and displaced the Neanderthals, in fact homo sapiens skulls had been found dated to 180,000 years ago in Israel, 210,000 years ago in Greece, and 300,000 ago in Morocco.   `We know that no trace of these Homo sapiens is found in the DNA records that came after… Yet here we were, walking around the Mediterranean 150,000 years too soon — and leaving nearby Neanderthals intact. When [this] band of bold Homo sapiens explorers stood on the banks of the Aegean in Greece they looked into a continent unconquered by their species. A new world and age lay within their grasp. Then, these brave pioneers failed to conquer it… All Homo sapiens who exist today did indeed leave Africa 60,000 years ago. All who left before then failed. Why?… With that final exodus… something had changed in Homo sapiens compared with those who left before.` The Babel impulse to `scatter` perhaps??

44 For more on what is called theistic evolution, or, better, evolutionary creationism (the position that God used macro-evolution as he created life in this world – which does not rule out the belief that at the origin of Adam and Eve God was stepping in supernaturally to create a new kind of being, rather than one evolved from other hominids that already existed), see for example Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: do we have to choose?, and biologos.org. In Britain see the website of the main body for Christians who are professional scientists, Christians in Science www.cis.org.uk . A very weighty (literally!) critique of evolutionary creationism is Theistic Evolution, ed. J P Moreland, Wayne Grudem and others (Wheaton: Crossway (2017)); see also the Biologos response, https://biologos.org/articles/a-flawed-mirror-a-response-to-the-book-theistic-evolution. At the opposite end of the spectrum is young-earth creationism, which is strongly anti-evolution but also opposes itself to the generally-accepted scientific view of the age of the earth; see Biblical Creation Society http://www.biblicalcreation.org.uk/; Answers in Genesis http://www.answersingenesis.org/; Institute for Creation Research www.icr.org . A middle position is old-earth creationism, also sceptical about evolution but not about the age of the earth: see Reasons to Believe www.reasons.org, Old Earth Ministries http://oldearth.org/ (formerly known as Answers in Creation), and the work of Hugh Ross. Reasons to Believe and Biologos published a volume exploring where they agree and disagree, Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?,   , Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press (2017).

Then also the significant   `intelligent design` movement, which is systematically misunderstood in the British media, explores the possibility that the universe’s origins etc point towards an (unspecified) intelligent designer: www.arn.org, Discovery Institute www.discovery.org and evolutionnews.org, and in Britain the Centre for Intelligent Design www.c4id.org.uk, and the books of William Dembski. See also http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Evolution/commission_on_creation.html#Commission%20on%20Creation for a detailed description of each position, and http://www.cis.org.uk/resources/articles-talks-and-links/creation/creationism-links/ for a helpful collection of links to each of them and their mutual debates.

45 For a helpful explanation of all this see Alexander, op.cit., pp.222-23.

46 https://reasons.org/explore/publications/rtb-101/read/rtb-101/2013/04/04/rtb-101-post-9-age-of-adam . It’s worth noting that the dates Alexander suggests (op.cit., pp.223-24) for `mitochondrial Eve` (`approximately 150,000 years ago`) and `Y-chromosomal Adam` (`around 100,000-150,000 years ago`) do in fact leave open the possibility of these two being contemporary, and hence indeed the biblical Adam and Eve.

47 Estimate quoted by Alexander on p.224.

48 See David Christian, Origin Story, London: Allen Lane (2018).

49 See, for a summary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory.

50 https://io9.gizmodo.com/close-calls-three-times-when-the-human-race-barely-esc-1730998797 . The genetic makeup of a very isolated population can change drastically in a very short time, in the sense of becoming less like other groups of the same species, because it isn’t mating with and pooling its genes with them. This is called `genetic drift`.

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