Finding Adam and Eve

Introduction

This article is an examination of Genesis 1-5 in relation to the Neolithic Revolution. Our question is whether the details of the account of Adam and Eve are consistent with what we know of the Neolithic Revolution in the Ancient Near East (ANE). The method of our enquiry is to take common points of view about the Neolithic Revolution, accepting that palaeo-archaeologists do have different opinions on its causes, dates and how it spread. We do not intend to question the textbook material,[1] for example any carbon-14 dates or stratigraphic analysis (why would we?); our goal is to see whether the details of Genesis 1-5 fit the pre-history that begins with the Neolithic Revolution. This topic is not new; it is easily found on the Internet.

For the purposes of this article, we assume an old earth creationist view of Gen 1:1-2.[2] We also assume that the genealogy of Genesis 5 is not consecutive and that it has generational gaps; the consequence of this is that we cannot use the genealogy to date the making of Adam and Eve. We also assume that the genealogies of Genesis 4 and 5 indicate greater longevity than is the norm today, and therefore they mask a corresponding unrecorded population growth.[3] Without these assumptions, there is no point in seeing whether the story[4] of Adam and Eve fits what we know about the Neolithic Revolution, since this is dated before the creation of Adam and Eve on a ‘no-gaps’ reading of Genesis 5. Our view is that the ‘book’ of the generations of Adam has the long ages that it does precisely because it structures a long period of history which we know as the Neolithic.

The Neolithic Revolution is a construct of Palaeo-archaeology and the story of Adam and Eve (or any other Mesopotamian pre-history) is inconsequential to its theory and practice. Consequently, this article isn’t about slipping Adam and Eve into an archaeological reconstruction under the radar, (so to speak). The Bible requires Adam and Eve to be the first human pair, specially created, from whom the whole human race can only have descended. They are not a pair of existing humans that are selected from a Neolithic settlement for a divine purpose, nor are they fictional figures in legendary folklore. The idea of special creation is obviously alien to the Palaeo-archaeology of the Neolithic Revolution. The challenge for this article is to see whether we can slice across the continuity of history and introduce a break that will be Adam and Eve and the start of Homo divinus (to use John Stott’s expression). This article is about judging where the discontinuity of the special creation of Adam and Eve should be placed.

In Bible-Science literature, those who defer to the scientific account of origins interpret Genesis 1-5 in an ‘a-historical’ way; those who interpret Genesis 1-5 as a literal historical record reject the current scientific consensus because of the assumptions that it makes when handling pre-historic times; our task is to show how a literal reading of the Bible can actually be harmonised with pre-history. Whereas Christians tend to think of the conflict between the Bible and Science as the debate between creation and evolution, this actually overshadows the ‘conflict’ between pre-historic Palaeo-archaeology and Genesis 1-5 which is far more significant. The creation-evolution debate looks as if it might be a scientific conflict but it is really about philosophy;[5] the ‘conflict’ between Palaeo-archaeology and the Bible is all about (pre) history.

So then, the elephant in the room for this article is going to be the special creation of Adam and Eve as the first human pair. We aren’t going to question the textbooks but we are going to make the challenge that it is the special creation of Adam and Eve that accounts for the Neolithic Revolution.

Defining Adam and Eve

The controversial area of our subject lies in the definition of ‘human’. The word ‘human’ is often used to cover Homo sapiens stretching back into the Palaeolithic.[6]  This is the question at issue in this article.

If we took a definition based on anatomy, we would conclude that Adam and Eve are not to be found at the beginning of the Neolithic Age (or any time thereafter) but humans are to be dated as an evolutionary stage in the Palaeolithic. A definition like ‘image and likeness of God’ (Homo divinus), however, is one based in cultural anthropology. There are expectations associated with this biblical definition and these are: a relationship to the one true God; fruitful reproduction; dominion over the land, sea and air; and domesticated agriculture and viticulture. The logic of the definition is behavioural – it is about what humans will be able to do in terms of sustaining their lives. And we should also add a spiritual dimension – a human is like the angels (Gen 1:26; Ps 8:5); this would allow us to include in our definition of ‘human’ the spiritual characteristics of angels who are themselves ‘images’ of God.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle of hominids was predominant until the Neolithic Revolution. If we adopt a Palaeolithic definition of ‘human’, this lifestyle dominated for tens (hundreds) of thousands of years; if we consider evolutionary scales and hominids generally, the lifestyle dominated for millions of years. The relatively brief and recent dominance of agriculture requires explanation, but even if we offer natural explanations like climate change or population pressure, the coincidence of the change with biblical timescales and the Bible’s concept of a ‘beginning’ is to be noted.

The definition of ‘human’ can become a demarcation dispute – a dispute over who owns the term and how it is to be used. The statement ‘Let us create man in our image and after our likeness’ (Gen 1:26) is a defining statement. If anthropologists define ‘human’ anatomically or culturally so as to apply the category further back in time, this is no more than a competing analytical choice and not an evidential one.[7] We can just as well restrict ‘human’ to the cultural and agricultural characteristics of man as these are displayed in the Genesis account and the Neolithic Revolution.[8]

This issue of definition also impacts the question as to whether with Adam and Eve God created the species ‘human’ or just two instances of an existing species we call ‘human’. The NT teaching is that all humans can only have descended from Adam and Eve; it is not a teaching that humans happen to have descended from Adam and Eve as two instances created among an existing species; Adam was the ‘first’ man (1 Cor 15:45).

Defining the Neolithic Revolution

Wikipedia [Feb 2015] offers a ‘catch-all’ summary of the Neolithic ‘revolution’:

…the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary (here meaning non-nomadic) societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and deforestation) which allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, trading economies, the development of non-portable art and architecture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., writing), and property ownership. The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (c. 5,500 BP), whose emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Defining and dating the Neolithic Revolution is a matter of scholarly debate. A. H. Simmons says, “The ‘Neolithic’ defies easy definition”.[9] Ofer Bar-Yosef’s introduction to the Neolithic period in the Near East is consistent with Wikipedia,

Preceded by two million years of the hunter-gatherer way of life—during which human evolution produced no major economic changes—it was in the Neolithic period that people first began to subsist from the cultivation of cereals and legumes, accompanied by domesticated sheep and goats, and not only from the gathering of seeds, fruits and tubers found in the wild and from the hunting of game animals.[10] (My emphasis)

Clearly, there is something here to explain. A two-million year-old way of life is on an evolutionary anthropological scale suddenly changed. It’s not important that we challenge the framework of human evolution assumed by Bar-Yosef; but merely note that such a sudden and dramatic change can easily be explained as the consequence of divine intervention.

There is a discontinuity here in the evolutionary anthropological scale. Bar-Yosef asks, “Why did the Neolithic Revolution take place in the Near East ten thousand years ago and not in another time and place?”[11] This is the right question. If we suggest the change is due to climate change, this doesn’t explain why comparable climate changes did not engender the Neolithic Revolution at an early time in some place or other. If we suggest the change just happened as human culture evolved, we have explained nothing regarding the relative suddenness of the change. To borrow terminology from evolutionary biology, the Palaeo-archaeological record suggests that we have ‘punctuated equilibrium’—a long period of stasis and then an ‘explosion’ of change which begins with the Neolithic Revolution and has continued until this day. A ‘gradualist’ picture, or to borrow terminology again, a Darwinian ‘step by step’ model, seems a bad fit.

In his introduction to the Bible and Archaeology, J. C. H. Laughlin says, “It is now known that human beings lived in Palestine over a million years ago in what is called the ‘Paleolithic’ (‘Old Stone’) period. For hundreds of thousands of years these people remained hunters and foragers. But sometime during the ninth millennium BC, Bronowski’s ‘largest single step in the ascent of man’ [J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973), 64] was taken.” Laughlin is just repeating the consensus view, as Bar-Yosef does, but his reference to Bronowski allows us to ask whether we need to recognise Homo divinus as a special creation of God.[12] This would mean that it would be inaccurate and/or misleading to speak of ‘humans’ in the Paleolithic age if, as a matter of theology, we want to reserve this term for ‘agriculturally modern humans’, or as we term them – Homo divinus.

Simmons says much the same thing:

Around 10,000 years ago, a dramatic transformation occurred in parts of the Near East that forever affected the human experience.[13] (My emphasis.)

The dramatic beginning here and the discontinuity Palaeo-archaeologists mark is an obvious point in the history of life on earth for the special creation of Adam and Eve. We can illustrate this by considering the concept of ‘continuity of settlement’ in a location. Archaeologists record this continuity as they uncover the layers of settlement and note the characteristics of each layer. They distinguish between consecutive layers of settlement, abandonment of a settlement and returns to a settlement. Such continuity of settlement does not allow for the special creation of Adam and Eve precisely because we can observe continuity. Hence, an abrupt change from a hunter-gatherer subsistence, essentially migratory, to an agriculturally based settled way of life, is the obvious beginning to associate with Adam and Eve. There is no record that they started a settlement and the Neolithic settlements we have so far dug up do not have to correspond to any started by their immediate progeny. The correspondence here is merely that the Neolithic Revolution started somewhere in the Near East about 10,000 years ago whether our current earliest settlement is Anatolia, the banks of the Euphrates, or the Jordan Valley.

It may seem an obvious start, but the Bible opens with ‘In the beginning…’, which means that the inspired author had a concept of a ‘beginning’. The account in Genesis 1 closes with the creation of human beings, which reflects the author’s view of the order of creation. There is an agricultural and pastoral character to the account. For example, there is the mention of grass, seed bearing fruit trees, cattle, and dominion over animals including fish. This characterizes the ‘beginning’ in terms that match a defining characteristic of the Neolithic Revolution. This is a first point of consistency between the record and our modern understanding of pre-history.

Dating

We can amplify this point by noting that the author of Genesis 1 is not describing ‘the beginning’ as the beginning of the universe or the planet earth and its atmosphere. The expressions ‘the heavens’ and ‘the earth’ are defined locally in terms of separation from waters, i.e. the earth is separated land and the heavens are an expanse between the waters of a theophanic storm-cloud and the waters of the sea (Gen 1:6-8).[14] The point is that the author of Genesis is aware that humankind has a beginning that is agricultural.

A consecutive biblical chronology dates the creation of Adam and Eve to around 4000 BCE. The Bronze Age and the invention of writing in Mesopotamia is dated to around 3200 BCE (Wikipedia[15]). The beginning of the Neolithic Revolution is dated to around 10,000 BP (Wikipedia).[16] We state these numbers in order to show the scale of the period covered by the ‘book’ of Adam’s genealogy in Genesis 5 when we date the creation of Adam and Eve to the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution.

The story of Adam and Eve is not big and it is very familiar – creation, a fall from grace, and Cain and Abel. In addition there are two genealogies, relating to the descendants of Cain and Seth respectively. If the creation of Adam and Eve coincides with the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, then around 5000 years of human history is untold (for us) until the invention of writing. On the other hand, if we followed a consecutive biblical chronology, we would have to place the creation of Adam and Eve in the closing centuries of the Neolithic Age.

Wikipedia offered a broad definition of the Neolithic Revolution and it ended with the comment that “the first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities” around 3500 BCE. Obviously, the concept of ‘the first’ in this comment could be matched with Genesis. We could argue that Adam and Eve were created around 4000 BCE and their progeny grew over the next five hundred years and established this complex of cities. The problem for this approach is what we do with the Palaeo-archaeology. Essentially, we would have to reject its dates and stratigraphic analysis. The Palaeo-archaeology paints a picture of substantial settlements in various parts of the Near East and a continuity of development from the beginning of the Neolithic through the introduction of ceramic technologies, and ending with the introduction of copper technologies. The break represented by Adam and Eve is difficult to fit into the Late Neolithic, because the whole of the Neolithic shows this continual development of agriculturally modern humans. There is no obvious change to correlate to the creation of Homo divinus. For this reason, we correlate the creation of Adam and Eve with the beginning of the Neolithic.

Palaeo-archaeologists have not sought to conform their findings to any biblical story; it has been their best judgment that there was a recent agricultural revolution, and this recency is a second point of consistency. The Neolithic Revolution is not dated in the distant past, but c. 10,000 BP. We do not have to treat the genealogy of Genesis 5 consecutively, but neither can we extend its scope to cover the time period conventionally assigned to earlier hunter-gatherer hominids (millions of years). The consecutive reading of Genesis 5 is only around 4000 years adrift of the beginning of the Neolithic in the Middle East, although we have to qualify this observation with the fact that some scholars date things a little earlier – it is all a matter of the evidence on the ground and exactly what counts as ‘the beginning’.

Pre-History

There is roughly a period of five thousand years from the beginning of the Neolithic to the invention of writing and the beginning of recorded history. Does this unrecorded block of time fit the biblical story? Is 5000 years too much time for the biblical story? We might ask: What was God doing during these five thousand years? We might think that this long period of time does not fit the biblical history, because it is implausible that God would not be interacting with human beings for so long and for this to go unrecorded. The problem with this line of thought is that it applies equally to a consecutive reading of Genesis 5 which covers about 1600 years of untold history, which is also a long period even if it is shorter than 5000 years.

This absence of story and history for the ante-diluvian period is consistent with the conventional date assigned to the invention of writing. The biblical history we have from this antediluvian time is just confined to the beginning of that time (Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel and Seth). The only other information we have is the important incidental detail in Cain’s genealogy. This relative absence of story after the beginning agrees with the later dating of the invention of writing because there is a period of unrecorded history both in the genealogy and for the archaeological data. How long we make this period is an open question at this point; we are assuming it is longer than the 800 years between 3200 and 4000 BCE. The non-consecutive reading of the genealogy of Genesis 5 allows a 5000 year span, but this depends on when we date the Mesopotamian Flood.[17] We might add that this lack of written history for the ante-diluvian period is a common feature of Egyptian and Mesopotamian records.

This is a third point of consistency between the biblical records and the common historical reconstruction – which is that there is actually a pre-historic period – a period of civilization before writing for which we have virtually no stories. This is quite remarkable – that there is pre-history in modern historiography and in the Bible. There is also a correspondence here with the New Creation and the Last Adam and the Second Man. There has now been 2000 years since Christ, but there has been no prophetic revelation supplying stories for Israel or the Church. There has, however, been an expansion of the population and a spread of the Gospel over the planet, which we can track.

Population Dispersal

Genesis is concerned with the Mesopotamian area, but the Palaeo-archaeological story is that the Neolithic Revolution spread over the planet with subsequently dated localised centres of Neolithic development in India, China, Africa, etc., (see map below). One of the consequences of the Neolithic Revolution is an expanding population over the planet. This is a fourth point of consistency with the biblical record, since the command to Adam and Eve was ‘to be fruitful and multiply’ and ‘fill the earth’ (Gen 1:28).[18]

Hunting and gathering could not possibly “support even a tiny fraction of the world’s current population.”[19] The change from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one was a prerequisite for the fulfilment of the objective to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. The account in Genesis is self-consistent in this regard, but this detail also fits the facts of anthropology except that the Bible ties the beginning of human beings (agriculturally defined) to a special creation. This difference has ramifications for dating Adam and Eve, i.e. we cannot date Adam and Eve to the beginnings of anatomically modern humans; the account corresponds to the emergence of agriculturally modern humans.

The increase in the Neolithic population, which we can track in the Palaeo-archaeological record, led to the development of more complex societies and commerce between settlements, all of which is evidenced in the record for various parts of the world. The KJV translates Gen 1:28 as ‘replenish the earth’, but this is translator interpretation and the verb is just the common one for ‘to fill’. The point here though is that the command ‘to fill the earth’ presupposes that this needed to be done. The narrator goes onto to describe Eve as the ‘mother of all living’ (Gen 3:20), and this early comment is accurate, since we are the same species of ‘settlement-based’ agricultural Homo – other Homo species (pre-Adamites) do not survive much beyond the Neolithic Revolution (if at all).

Studies have shown that population growth in new areas is rapid. P. Bellwood notes that “In comparative situations in recent history, rates of human population growth and territorial expansion have sometimes been quite remarkable.”[20] Population growth and expansion during the Neolithic Age is not an issue for Bible interpretation. Since Genesis only offers stories from the beginning of the Neolithic (on our reconstruction), we are interested in the likely population of hunter-gatherers (pre-Adamites) across the world at the Genesis beginning, the pattern of their extinction, and the likely population growth of the descendants of Adam. Cain was banished from his homeland and he wandered in the land of wandering. This detail meshes with the Neolithic beginning: the ‘wandering’ associated with this land is descriptive of a hunter-gatherer mode of existence.

Estimates of hunter-gathers can be made on the basis of a calculation about the population density that certain terrains can support; we may also have archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers in such areas. However, we cannot know the population in an area because the physical evidence is scattered and the dates for the evidence do not coalesce, allowing us to be sure of the population of any one area at any one time. Our estimates are an extrapolation. The estimates are better for Neolithic settlements. These are documented but obviously the number increases as archaeologists dig up new settlements. We can estimate population for an area based on the number of settlements and their surface area and the number of dwellings and their surface area, but as Bellwood observes, “Unfortunately, archaeologists can never know exactly how many people occupied an area in prehistoric times”.[21]

Bellwood is concerned with population growth and Neolithic settlements. He says, “The big question is, of course, how rapidly could human populations have increased their numbers and territorial extents in early agricultural situations, at times when competition from other populations and threats from disease and mortality rates were probably at fairly minimal levels compared to what was to come in later millennia?”[22] His question is relevant to the interpretation of Genesis because one Neolithic settlement is noted, that of Cain (Gen 4:17).

Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful and multiply from the outset. Seth was born when Adam was 130 years (Gen 5:3) and so Adam’s descendants in the course of 130 years could have become quite numerous (through angelically controlled interbreeding). After Cain’s departure, he has a son and later builds a city and names the city after his son. These are the two facts recorded about Cain and the building of the city would have happened much later than the birth of his son, when his descendants too had become more numerous (this is how Hebrew summary narrative works). However, how big the population was or how far it had spread is unknowable.

Near East

There is an obvious fifth point of consistency with the biblical record because it places Adam and Eve in the Middle East. The argument here is that the agricultural revolution could have started elsewhere and some scholars do hold that it began independently in several places around the world (see map). A common reconstruction, however, places the beginnings of this revolution in the Middle East. For example, Bellwood dates it to 11,000 BP.[23] The map of agricultural centres of origin (homelands) and dispersal given below is from Wikipedia.

The significance of this point depends on the context in which it is put. The detail of the Genesis beginning is not consistent with the hunter-gatherer mode of existence of earlier hominids. Genesis might conceivably have begun with a record of ‘human beings’ just being given dominion over the beasts of the earth and the fish of the sea, in which case we would not have been able to see a correspondence with the Neolithic Revolution. Had the account reflected an even earlier mode of existence, there then might have been development of the story in Genesis 4 to indicate a transition to agriculture in human pre-history. This is not the story that we have which has an emphasis on subsistence agriculture from the beginning.

Dispersal of Agriculture

Those areas in the world that first developed agriculture include the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP); the Yangtze and Yellow River Basin (9000 BP); Central Mexico and Northeastern South America (5000-4000 BP) and Eastern USA (4000-3000 BP).[24]  We have already noted the chronological priority of the Levant in dating the Neolithic Revolution. The biblical account implies that there would be dispersal of agriculture throughout the earth and not just man; the command to Adam and Eve was to fill the earth even if we think the command initially refers to the local land(s), but this command is tied to Adam subduing the earth. This is a sixth point of consistency with the Palaeo-archaeological record. The point here is that man might have populated the earth as a hunter-gatherer but this is not the implication of the Genesis account.

The development of agriculture implies settlement; the dispersal of agricultural knowledge requires migration and hunter-gatherer subsistence during migration. Did distant homeland areas develop agriculture separately? How and why was agriculture from a homeland area then dispersed? For example, if the birth of agriculture was in the Fertile Crescent circa. 11,000 BP, this does not exclude hunter-gatherer subsistence and migratory lifestyles being followed in, say, the Eastern USA before agriculture was initiated in 3000-4000 BP – a hunter-gatherer lifestyle could be practised by the descendants of Adam after leaving an agriculturally based settlement and for generations. Population migration does not imply the export of agriculture. On the other hand, we can trace dispersal of agriculturally based settlements from a homeland to surrounding regions and we can observe affinities between Neolithic homelands on various continents.

In sum: the Palaeo-archaeological evidence behind dispersal is that closely linked settlements in terms of artifacts, duration of occupation, and an agricultural basis, tend to “become younger as one moves away from regions of agricultural origin”.[25] In order for there to be consilience between the biblical story and Palaeo-archaeology, there would have to be evidence of the beginnings of agriculture in an area of the world at later dates than the Fertile Crescent and for there to be affinities between agricultural practice and cultural artifacts in all areas. This is what we find and Neolithic dispersal is more or less ‘complete’ across the globe by the time that writing emerges in Mesopotamia.

Cultivation

Cultivation of crops in fields[26] according to a seasonal cycle involving planting and harvesting is a characteristic of the Neolithic Revolution. Sowing seed and tilling the ground are key activities; regular rainfall is vital. Cultivation then leads to domestication of crops where certain seed crops are selected for their advantages. The point here is that this kind of human activity is more than just using the wild varieties of plants in their natural habitat which characterizes hunter-gatherers: cultivation is about the conscious control of plants for food. We find these details in the Genesis account: ‘seed’, ‘plants’ (Gen 1:11f); ‘field’, ‘till’, ‘ground’, and ‘rain’ (Gen 2:5); and seasons (Gen 1:14). This is a seventh point of consistency between Genesis and the Neolithic Revolution.

Bellwood says that the question, why did agriculture develop in the first place “is one of the most enduring questions posed by archaeologists and one that probably generates more debates than any other major archaeological question.”[27] It is at this point that the special creation of Adam and Eve challenges Palaeo-archaeology because it is not included in their explanatory framework.

Conclusion

Our knowledge that there was an agricultural revolution in the first place is obviously matched by the knowledge of the writer(s) of Genesis 1 and 2. Genesis 2:5 (KJV) is particularly clear, “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.” This is very specific narrator awareness of a time before there was a man to till the ground; moreover, it is ‘field’ agriculture which is specifically identified. It is this kind of food production which defines the Neolithic. Our argument in this article is not that our text is consistent but that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-2 knew the same thing that we know – that agriculture had a beginning.[28]