Those who believe in a literal Bible mistakenly take Adam and Eve of Genesis as the first human couple. It isn’t abundantly clear that Adam and Eve were the only living humans at the time. For instance when Cain murders Abel and was to be shunned by other humans he was saved from being immediately killed, which implies others were alive at that time of the narrative. The Genesis account places Eden in Mesopotamia, literally between rivers. From a science perspective, we estimate Hominids evolved from apes in the Old World, possibly Africa, somewhere around 5 million years ago. By our modern reckoning, we descend from a relatively few modern humans who migrated out of Africa. There was a population bottleneck of  a small number of perhaps a few hundred anatomically modern humans. This conclusion is based on genetic data and occurred roughly only 80-100 thousand years ago.  At that time there may have been a prototypical Eve, mother of us all, but that seems unlikely. If there were at one time only few humans, humanity hung by a thin demographic thread. A slight disaster like a rock fall or flood, and there wouldn’t be any of us!

According to current understandings, it fails to be abundantly clear whether we all descend from one couple or a small number of human out of Africa migrants. Those left in Africa by our intrepid travelers would be expected to be more genetically diverse than the migrants who descend from small numbers. This is consistent with genetic studies. Homo sapiens now counts himself, among the latest of large number of hominid radiations, many emerging out of Africa. It is possible that some hominid populations preceding modern men, Homo neanderthalensis or Homo Denisova, Peking Man, did not migrate from Africa but may have evolved from other proto-human apes closer to where ancient skeletal specimens have been found.  It is generally understood that all hominids evolved from ape predecessors in the Old World as apes evolved after the New and Old hemispheres separated from some primal Gondwandaland.

The notion that the Biblical Genesis is the story of the creation of Man is a misnomer.  Adam and Eve are not the first humans but the first historical or civilized humans. A critical idea is the emergence of self-consciousness, as with fig leaf along with it ethics (understanding of good and evil),  along with that religion, and a dialog with God. As far as we can tell, no living thing other than humans, have religion of any type or belief in a higher being.  Therefore, like it or not, belief in a higher power is one factor that separates humans from all other living things. The major point that Genesis makes is that the whole world is a product of the one God as if by fiat.  Everything, I like to think just because I am a neurologist, emanates from the head of this One Being.  Far from Genesis being merely just another creation myth,  as atheists would have it, at least in conversations I have had with them, Genesis is unique.  You don’t find in Genesis a life or death struggle between competing muscular gods. Certainly there are lots of creation myths, more than the number of other cultures, but none other that I know of insists in just this way that the whole world comes directly from the dictates the will, indeed out of the head, of just one supreme knowing creator.

Not only that, everything emanates out of a sorting process or cognitive separation.  Light is separated from darkness, numinous sky (Shomayim) from water (mayim). Man is differentiated from other beasts, plants from animals, daylight from night light.  For scientists separation (analysis) is the golden path to cognitive understanding, that is discernment. Someone who fails to discern or separate is not a man but a slug or at any event, lacks understanding. For religion the holy is separate from the profane. Holiness is separation.  As a science person and not a typical believer I’d go further.  Genesis sees creation in a pre-existing state not ex-nihilo. God’s act of separating means setting the Universe in a low entropy state. Thus the Deity in the Beginning winds the mainspring of a clock of low entropy, placing time’s arrow according to the second law of thermodynamics,  setting Time on its course**.  I don’t know of anything remotely resembling this in any creation myth I have been exposed to.  I’d be very grateful if someone showed me anything comparable in other creation stories. But until then please don’t call Genesis just another creation myth.

And the story as regards humans is not an account of biological creation but the start of culture or civilization at least in what is held by some to be the second creation story of Genesis 2. It has long been said that Genesis contains two creation stories, the first the creation of the world, and the second focussing on man. The two stories were possibly written by different persons hundreds of years apart and use different names for the creator, but the second story seems to be about the dawn of civilization. History starts with writing, the embellishing new awareness that arose only some thousands of years ago, not 4.5 Billions of years ago at the start of our planet. So there is seems to be common misunderstanding of the account in Genesis. Those literalist religionists who insist the planet is five or 6 thousand years old have it all wrong for many reasons.  But one of these, is a fundamental misreading of the account of Genesis especially enumeration of human characters and generations and begats from which these numbers derive.  If the Biblical world is only some thousands of years old by these reckonings, then the Bible must be talking about the mental world, the start of languages even paleo written languages such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs or Babylonian Wedge cuneiform writing. Then the history as recalled would go back only some thousands of years to the agricultural revolution. The  human story is not biological but cultural even including the account of Adam’s rib which is there to make a point. I’m very content to place the origin of human awareness with the emergence of spoken or even written language, only I would have to admit that the existence of such cave paintings as are found at Lascaux and Altamira being some thirty or so thousands of years old, provide good evidence for dating of current forms of human consciousness all those many years ago beginning with anatomically modern human with his sleek 1350 cc brain.

I just returned from China where a boat ride on the Yangtze, home of the Three Gorges Project, and seeing the life of humans along river valleys in history hit me right between the eyes. I had to have a word for this and thinking about Mesopotamia and also hippopotamus the river horse, I came up with a neologism for river man, Homo-potamus. I was attached to my own word. To my chagrin, I found homo-potamus already in an urban dictionary referring funnily to a fat gay man. This is wrong on many levels as potamus is Greek for River not a hippo which is the word for horse.

Homo is my anthropological referent for species in human genus even though anthro obviously does mean man and may be better suited since anthro is Greek and so is potamus while homo is Latin but anthro somehow doesn’t seem to convey the same meaning, referent to a man, specifically a river man.  Specifically Homo refers to hominids who generally stand on two feet and have brains larger than apes. Hominids, humans and their close relatives who diverged from some earlier form of Chimpanzee about 5 M years ago. survived over certain eras in a succession of different environments.  First, apes differentiated from monkeys who lived primarily in trees. Then hominids broke away from apes spending more time on the ground. Life in trees left its mark in our visual system since tree living and brachiation requires an advanced stereoscopic 3D visual sense suitable for rapid travel in trees preventing serious falls.  The exhibit in New York’s Natural History museum made this point for me. Monkeys evolved in trees and basically traded strong senses of smell in their rodent ancestors for great vision. Then like baboons, hominids eventually moved into niches with few trees, the savannah. When I was taking anthropology in college decades ago baboons were the biological model for human society and it was all about Irven DeVore.  Later, influenced by Jane Goodall, the animal model for humans was Chimps, who are obviously our closest relatives. But out on the grass was where an erect two legged posture evolved which had the effect of seeing predators and prey., freeing the hands. It is thought that free hands allowed for manipulable opposable thumbs, works of the hands and the evolution of linguistically competent brains. Right handedness is strongly related to the evolution of true language in the left hemisphere, the side that controls the right hand. Fine manual dexterity is closely related anatomically to the development of language which obviously has intimate relations with cognitive capacity. Fear not, though as we humans have all these influences primate, monkey, ape and hominid still inside of us. Nothing has been expunged. All of our evolutionary history is still with us as was pointed out by Ernst Haeckel, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The Genesis story places the Garden of Eden between the Rivers very likely the Tigris and Euphrates as the Hebrews bore close historical ties with the Babylonia through multiple courses of their history. The earliest description of men near rivers bears intimate relation with the agricultural revolution that gave rise to city states. We thus can trace our biological forebears on a path through the trees, then to grassy plains or savannahs where they developed further into hominids and true human. Then we see them radiating out of Africa  maybe first settling in some caves. All the while humans were associating in larger and larger bands as hunter gatherers, sharing spoils with tribes and larger groups and even with other social hunting animals in packs especially wolves/dogs.  But late in paleolithic/neolithic history men settled by rivers in agricultural communities and this led to forming still larger groups, specialization, emergence of religions and cultures and war, and massive increase in numbers. At this point along the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, and especially  the Yangtze, Yellow and Indus Rivers. The very largest human concentrations depend directly on rivers streaming the Tibetan plateau. River man, homo-potamus, was capable of unprecedented reproduction as attaining Malthusian proportion.   Along with this came social man’s abilities to make great  public works, such as the huge funerary projects and tombs, I just saw in China with the terra cotta warriors, and massive projects ranging from the Great Wall to the Three Gorges Dam and to fight great wars, and atrocities, impalement and mass live burials,  good and evil, on massive scales, all the work of River Man. As footnote we moderns tend to blame wars and atrocities on religion. But I’ve recently been reading Karen Armstrong and her book, Fields of Blood who assigns violence mostly on this particular civilizing stage of human development and not religion as such, and I think she often makes a good argument.

It is said that our we have reached a point in geologic history that man is the creature who matters. We hold within our trembling hands the life or death of our planet. Of that there is no doubt. Some knowing persons place us in new geologic era of man what they call  the “anthropocene.”  But as person, more concerned with the ages of man more than the ages of the earth, I can recount in our broad history the tree primate, homo sylvaticus, the hunter-gatherer of the savannah, Homo savanicus, and River man of civilization, all cities  having been built along rivers, Homo-potamus. These ages of humankind derive from where we get food, and are thus trophic or feeding forces. In this we are like all other creatures who must make a living on what they eat.  Finally we are approaching yet another age as information or knowledge men, variously called cyber men, the wholly sapient, true homo sapiens, where for the first time success will not be measured by where we will get the next meal but in the precision of our knowledge. At that time, mankind has within reach the chance of evolving into a partly or wholly non-biological form or at least he might advance by the acquisition of knowledge rather than by comparatively slow biological Darwinian processes, as in the past. In that age of man changes will occur rapidly and man may cease to be man anymore.

**(Entropy is often explained with Humpty-Dumpty who sits on a wall in an well-organized state. Humpty’s yoke is separate from egg white and shell but then he falls off. Once these separate parts mix, disorder or entropy is increased and you can’t put Humpty back in an organized state. As time marches forward things tend to disorganize. Your house and car fall apart, coffee mixes with cream placed on top, or otherwise stated, entropy, disorganization, tends to increase. You can’t reverse this process i.e. turn back time. So time’s arrow is the same as the second law of thermodynamics known since at least the 19th century which states that entropy or disorder increases. Local exceptions to this rule are life, consciousness, the organization of thought that is the human mind, but these are temporary local exceptional phenomena destined to fail. The Genesis Deity is described to have organized, separated, winding the mainspring of a clock, setting time’s arrow. I am just reading an extended discussion of this, From Eternity to Here by physicist Sean Carroll.)**