Genesis and Human Origins

 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

Attempts to reconcile the biblical creation stories with the findings of science fail because they begin with unexamined assumptions such as the Bible is true and the sciences are not reliable. Another misleading assumption involves the Young Earth Creationists' use of the Genesis "begats" to date Adam and Eve who they believe to be the first people created by God. They believe the first humans appeared about 8000 years ago. However, that is when the first Hebrew communities emerged in the Nile Valley.

A detailed and objective reading of Genesis reveals that the historical Adam and Eve were among the founders of the Hebrew ruler-priest caste, the most important biblical population. They had a distinction marriage and ascendency pattern that reflects a long history of royal activity. Long before Abraham lived (c.2000 B.C.) the early Hebrew had already dispersed across the ancient world. However, their point of origin appears to have been the Nile Valley because the oldest known site of Hebrew worship is at Nekhen on the Nile.

When the historical Adam and Eve lived, the Hebrew ruler-priests maintained sacred sites the length of the Nile River. Information about them is available for interested parties. They were a caste organized into two ritual groups (moieties). They offered prayers for the people who came to their shrines and temples. The scribed prayers on the walls of royal tombs. Many of those prayers reveal belief in bodily resurrection. The prayers have been translated to English and published in The Ancient Pyramid Texts.

The hard facts about the people known to the historical Adam and Eve should not be ignored. The creation narratives of Genesis have a historical and cultural context that can be studied. The context is the Ancient Nile Valley Civilization. And yes, humans first appeared in Africa. That is where to oldest known human remains have been found and they date to millions of years ago. The Hebrew people did not yet exist, but there is evidence that the Creator was working among our archaic ancestors. They recognized patterns in Nature. They realized that life is in the blood, and they hoped for life after death. 

Our human ancestors lived so far back in the past that they cannot be identified. John Hawks, a world renown paleoanthropologist explains:

"It has been proposed that modern humans descended from a single woman, the 'mitochondrial Eve' who lived in Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. The human immune system DRB1 genes are extremely polymorphic, with gene lineages that coalesce into an ancestor who lived around 60 million years ago, a time before the divergence of the apes from the Old World monkeys. The theory of gene coalescence suggests that, throughout the last 60 million years, human ancestral populations had an effective size of 100,000 individuals or greater. Molecular evolution data favor the African origin of modern humans, but the weight of the evidence is against a population bottleneck before their emergence. The mitochondrial Eve hypothesis emanates from a confusion between gene genealogies and individual genealogies." (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8533083/)

Hawks added, "First, modern humans did not originate in a bottleneck after 200,000 years ago. Our origin was much deeper in time than this." (Many Groups of Archaic Humans)

Paleoanthropologists such as John Hawks are searching for the truth. John Hawks notes that there is a wider range of anatomical features among Neanderthals than is generally recognized. Hawks also believes that there are limits to what can be determined by genetic tests of archaic fossils. He relies on morphological studies.

The story of human origins cannot be understood from DNA alone. That takes us back only to about 500,000 years ago. To gain understanding of human activity before that we must consider the artifactual evidence. Humans were using butchering flints between 2.5 and 3 million years ago. Some human fossils found in East Africa date to 3 million+ years ago.

However, the morphological research is the most significant. When Jeremy DeSilva compared the ankle joint, the tibia and the talus fossils of human ancestors ("hominins") between 4.12 million to 1.53 million years old, he discovered that all of the ankle joints resembled those of modern humans rather than those of apes. Chimpanzees flex their ankles 45 degrees from normal resting position. This makes it possible for apes to climb trees with great ease. While walking, humans flex their ankles a maximum of 20 degrees. The human ankle bones are quite distinct from those of apes.

The discovery of a complete fourth metatarsal of A. afarensis at Hadar that shows the deep, flat base and tarsal facets that "imply that its midfoot had no ape-like midtarsal break. These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like that of modern humans." (Carol Ward, William H. Kimbel, Donald C. Johanson, Feb. 2011)

Related reading: Artifacts of Great Antiquity; Funerary Rites and the Hope of Resurrection; Early Resurrection Texts; Three Portraits of Adam; What Paleoanthropologists Want to Discover; The Shrine City of Nekhen;