After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science (Report‪)‬

Modern science has amply demonstrated that phenomena such as predation, death, and the extinction of species have been intrinsic and even necessary aspects of life on earth for billions of years, long before the arrival of Homo sapiens. For this reason, many Bible-believing Christians have long found it difficult to read Genesis 1-3 as a factual account of human origins. The status of Adam and Eve, in particular, has become a keen topic of interest in Christian circles over the last several years. Much of this interest has been sparked by a variety of studies that call into question (in effect, if not intent) the historicity of the Bible's first couple. The ever-growing hominid fossil record unmistakably shows that human beings did not appear suddenly but evolved gradually over the course of six million years. (1) Further, anthropologically sensitive studies of Genesis have observed that the biblical Adam and Eve and their early offspring are portrayed as figures living in the Neolithic period, around 9,000 to 7,000 BCE, which is some 30,000 years later than the earliest archaeological evidence for religious behavior and culture among humans. (2) More recently, research in molecular biology indicates that the genetic diversity of the present human population cannot possibly be traced back to a single couple living in Mesopotamia a few thousand years ago. The best mathematical models suggest, rather, that the ancestors of all modern Homo sapiens were a population of about 10,000 interbreeding individuals who were members of a much larger population living in Africa around 150,000 years ago. (3) This genetic evidence corroborates the fossil evidence for the date and location of the earliest anatomically modern human beings.