When Did Adam Live?
What does science say about the age of the human race and its possible connection to the historical Adam?
INTERVIEWER: You assert, and I understand why you do, that Adam was an historical individual. He reappears in the New Testament, of course. He's mentioned on the lips of Jesus in the Gospels. He’s mentioned by Paul, and so on. So we are constrained to accept his historicity if we had to take this Scripture with great seriousness. But the question is: When did he live? This kind of goes into the whole issue of contemporary scientific accounts of human evolution. So we're looking at: when did he live? I mean, we're going now into archeology. We're going into genetics or whatever it is you propose we use as a way of determining the age of the human race that we as contemporary people are physically descended from. We're sons of Adam, literally I think. Could you just explain how you connect this up with when Adam lived and the contemporary scientific accounts of human evolution.
DR. CRAIG: Yes. The question of when humanity originated on this planet is a scientific question, not a Biblical question. I think we can first set up some very broad parameters. I think that when you get to the beautiful cave paintings, for example in France at Chauvet and Lascaux, these are clearly the products of human artists. They are beautiful, breathtaking images. So at least by this time humanity is already there. On the other hand, if you push far back into the past, I think when you get to Homo erectus a million years or so ago then you're dealing with hominins who have a brain case that is too small to support modern human consciousness. So sometime in this window between Homo erectus and these beautiful cave paintings humanity originated. What I try to do in the book is to close that window more tightly to determine the time at which Adam and Eve existed. What I point out is that we are looking for people like us in the past. When did people like us first make their appearance? And that will involve not simply anatomical similarity to us but more importantly cognitive behaviors that we exhibit. The anthropologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks list four of these modern cognitive behaviors including things like planning depth, abstract thinking, technological innovation, and symbolic thinking. Obviously those are intangible. We can't detect them . . .
INTERVIEWER: It's a wonderful criteria, but how on earth do you connect that with the archeological . . .?
DR. CRAIG: So, what McBrearty and Brooks say is that we have to look for what they call archaeological signatures of these modern cognitive behaviors. They list around two dozen of these archaeological signatures that give evidence for symbolic thinking or technological innovativeness or planning for the future. It is stunning how deep into the past these archaeological signatures go. On the basis of these, I argue that humanity did not originate with Homo sapiens; that in fact Neanderthals and their descendants (Denisovans) were equally human with Homo sapiens. They also exhibited these modern cognitive behaviors, and therefore the origin of humanity must go back even further to at least the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and this is the so-called Homo heidelbergensis (or Heidelberg man) who had a brain capacity . . .
INTERVIEWER: Was it some guy called Heidelberg who . . . was it a German guy who discovered this? I don’t know.
DR. CRAIG: It is named after the city of Heidelberg where a jaw of this hominin was first found. Since then it's been found in various places around the world. So this suggests that humanity originated somewhere around 750,000 years ago. We don't know exactly where, perhaps in the Middle East or perhaps in Africa. But then from then it spread into Africa where it evolved into Homo sapiens and into Europe where it evolved into Neanderthals and Denisovans. So we all are part of this common human family.