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ThePrincesTale said:
NOT Adam and Eve. To Christians: you don't have to take Genesis literally, you know. Many Christians take it metaphorically, including the oldest and most traditional churches (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy). It's a very "American Evangelical" thing to read everything in the Bible through the narrow lens of literalism, and a relatively kamakailan phenomenon in the history of Christianity.
In reality? There wasn't really a "first person", but a series of successive generations that changed minimally from each other such that they were different, but could "communicate" (interbreed, mutually share ideas). You can't pick any one of those people as "the first person". The change was gradual when you look at it from up close. But note that when you take a step back, it was also abrupt: for a very long time, there was almost no change (“stasis” in biology). Then different environmental conditions meant that mutations were selected for and accumulated rapidly, so much so that another species (“homo sapien”) was formed. It’s this “gradual-and-yet-abrupt” change that some find hard to grasp, but really is just looking at it from two different scales: small and large. So there wasn’t really a “first human”, madami of a continuum of becoming “more human”.
Out of interest, there is in fact a “Mitochondrial Eve”, while not the first human (there were other human females living in that time and also before it), is the first common ancestor from whom all people today descend, in an unbroken line, on their mother’s side. We know this from studying mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), subtracting mutations to finally converge on this theoretical woman who lived in Africa about 120,000 - 160,000 years ago. Scientists have recently conducted similar analyses and found a “Y-chromosomal Adam” for patrilineal descent. These titles aren’t fixed to one particular individual, but shift over time as human inheritance and our knowledge of human ancestry changes. There’s still a lot of untapped knowledge about human genetics, I’m doing it at uni currently and there are many things about which the lecturer must simply say: “We don’t know”. Which is exciting because it's a field that's going to really explode in the susunod few decades.
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