Scientists finally have evidence to prove if Adam and Eve really existed
Scientists finally claim to have the answer on whether or not Adam and Eve really did exist.
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were the first two humans and were made by God. The Old Testament says they lived in the Garden of Eden and are central to the belief that everyone on the planet descended from a single pair of original ancestors.
While there have been detractors around the biblical story, there is a growing body of evidence which demonstrates that at least some parts of the account could be true. Incredibly, Archaeologists have found surprising signs that Eden was not only a real place but could have been the birthplace of civilisation as we know it,
Biologists have shown that all humans alive today actually do share a single common ancestor but making the Bible’s accounts of history mesh with modern science does require throwing out a lot of the narrative.
In the holy book, Adam and Eve live in a place called the Garden of Eden which is described a beautiful land of plenty and abundance. The Bible surprisingly provides a pretty accurate indication of where this mythical garden is located.
In the book of Genesis, the first in the Bible — it states that a river flows through Eden and divides into four branches: The Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.
That could mean saying goodbye to the notion that God created Adam and Eve, or even questioning whether our biblical ancestors were Homo Sapiens. Of these, the Tigris and the Euphrates are well known and still flow through modern-day Iraq. But, the Gihon and the Pishon are not definitively known as locations and there are doubts as to whether they still exist.
It is believed that the location could be in several locations but the most plausible is that the Garden of Eden was in an area called Mesopotamia. Literally meaning ‘between rivers’ in Ancient Greek, this region sits between the Tigris and Euphrates and straddles what is now situated in eastern Syria, northwestern Turkey, and most of Iraq.
Professor Eric Cline, a classical and biblical archaeologist from George Washington University wrote a book about the Garden of Eden where he argued this theory matches the scriptural and archaeological evidence.
In his book ‘From Eden to Exile’, Professor Cline says: “This makes some sense from a textual point of view, because not only does the biblical account say that the garden lay ‘in the east’, meaning to the east of Israel, but it also mentions the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in connection with the Garden of Eden.”
Mesopotamia is widely believed to be the place where plants and animals were first domesticated between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago during the so-called Neolithic revolution. This progression led to the earliest transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural lifestyles and led to the birth of the first permanent human settlements.
Professor Cline added: “This area may have also become somewhat of an agricultural paradise for the local residents following the invention of irrigation during the fourth millennium BC.”
To add credence to the Bible’s story, scientists really do believe that all living humans are descended from a single woman. The ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is seen as the common female ancestor to which all modern human beings can be traced through DNA.
This common ancestor exists because, no matter how big the surveyed initial population is, the chances are that most female lineages will eventually come to an end at some point. And while Mitochondrial Eve has been proven to not have been the first human — every other female lineage eventually died off and failed to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is a type of genetic material passed from mothers, onto their children.
The same logic determined that there must also be a ‘Y-chromosome Adam’ which would explain where the Y-chromosome in every living human originates.
Still, the theory has its detractors with some suggesting that while everyone on the planet shares DNA with common ancestors, this is not necessarily from the “first couple.” The man and woman most likely lived in different times and may not have had children together as their existences could have been centuries apart.
However, Dr Joshua Swamidass, a biologist from Washington University, argued that there is no reason to believe that humanity does not descend from a single couple.
As the case of the Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam shows, there is no scientific barrier to humans having a common ancestor even if the population never reduced to a single couple.
In an article, published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Dr Swamidass wrote: “Many individuals are each individually ancestors of ‘all the living’.
“All humans alive descend from each of these universal ancestors. The same can be said for all alive in AD 1, or all alive when recorded history begins. Two of them could be a particular couple, named Adam and Eve in scripture, from whom we all descend.”
While Dr Swanidass is merely showing that there is nothing in our understanding of evolutionary biology that prohibits the existence of Adam and Eve as a couple — he is not definitively putting it forward as a concrete explanation.
As Dr Swamdiss noted, there is still an issue that Homo Sapiens were not the first humans on Earth.
Professor William Lane Craig however has gone all in, as a philosopher from Houston Christian University, he argues that Adam and Eve must have been the first people to truly be human.
Using criteria including the capacity for abstract thought, technological innovation, and the use of symbols — he argues that the first true humans emerged much earlier than homo sapiens.
In an article published in First Things, Professor Craig writes: “Adam and Eve may plausibly be identified as belonging to the last common ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals — usually designated as Homo Heidelbergensis.”
He added: “Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago — a conclusion consistent with the evidence of population genetics.”
