It is too strange

I first allowed evolution to be a reality by holding onto a Biblicaly literal Adam and Eve story. There was a mitochondrial 'Eve" about 150 - 200 thousand years ago.  That means we can all trace our mitochondrial DNA lines back to her, but she was not the only person around.  We inherit our mitochondria (that little power-house in our cells with its own DNA) from our mothers, so this doesn't help us with an Adam.  The males have a "Y" factor in their chromosomes which can also be linked back, the common male ancestor is about 90 thousand years old, so a Noah maybe?  I don't think the scientists named that guy, but they did name that woman we share mitochondria with "Eve".  Here's the catch.  Lines break.  Mitochondrial Eve is the woman who managed to produce daughters, granddaughters etc, straight up till today.  If one generation of her descendants had not had any daughters, her DNA line would have been broken and another woman, further back in time, would have been the mitochondrial Eve.  This is more about a statistic than a person.

But Mitochondrial Eve and her husband "Adam"would have lived back in the Middle Paleolithic era. The Middle Paleolithic peoples were Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. The Neanderthal DNA has just been sequenced and it looks like we avoided them genetically.* No trysts in the forrest between the two groups. "Eve" would have had a basic understanding of religion (art is developed and so is burying the dead). This is, however, way, way, way before writing or agriculture. Eden is a garden and Adam is expected to do his own gardening (farming) once he is kicked out of Paradise onto the cursed land.  The first couple may have lived a long time, but this setting is over 100,000 years before agriculture even begins, even Adam wasn't that old. Let's remember nothing is written down, there is no record left for future reference here, only oral tradition would be a possible means to pass the story along.

Try this: If I asked what your grandmother's name was, most of us would know, what about your great-grandma?  Yep.  Okay her mom - your great-great grandma?  And what about your great-grandma's grandma (your great-great-great grandma)?  Lost you yet?  I haven't a clue.  Unless you are an aristocrat, you probably lose track of this at some point. Even if you have a family tree, do you know anything other than their name and birthdate/place?  We don't even know much about our own Grandparent's grandparents, let alone relatives living a millenium ago.

National heros may stick in a population's memory for a time, but for how long?  If we didn't use anyone mentioned in the Bible, how many thousand years can we go back?  Alexander the Great, just over 2 thousand years ago,  King Ashoka less, Gutama Buddha about 2500 - I can't think of an historical, non-bibical figure beyond Buddha.  I don't think Gilgamesh truly counts but he was supposedly king of the Akkadians about 4700 years ago.  Do you know why I don't count Gilgamesh?  It is because he hasn't been a consistent historical figure.  Sure he has epics widely written about his feats, he survived the worldwide flood, he battled demon gods and Sea Leviathans and did all sorts of legendary stuff.  But despite his obvious popularity back 5,000 years ago, he fell out of human consciousness for at least 2500 years.  In the 1800s some British Archeologists found the Babylonian/Mesopotamian stella, and could now translate ancient Mesopotamian texts, including a heap of Gilgamesh stories.  But it was not oral tradition that gave us Gilgamesh as an historical figure, it was written tradition.

Let's place "Eve" at 150,000 years ago.  What legend or tale could let her memory live on for that long?  I can't get beyond Gilgamesh (4700 years ago) in historical figures,  keeping in mind that historical means written.  Could Adam and Eve really get passed down orally form the Middle Paleolithic period - they have so many Summerian characteristics about them.  It is doubtful the Summerians' would have told oral legends about people as far removed as mitochondrial Eve.

For those who haven't read their Bible in, oh, forever, Genesis Chapter two also mentions where Eden is, an important piece of info for it to be historical.  Or, does it?  I leave you to grab a map and your copy of Genesis and try to figure out where the river that feeds the headwaters could be, don't ask google where Bibical scholars place Eden, just have fun trying to figure it out yourself.  I will continue the strangeness of Genesis next post.

UPDATE*
Okay, here is my first lesson about blogging new scientific discoveries.  The scientist is excited and shares a little, not complete picture, of what is know with a reporter before the full report is released, the reporter is excited and shares the incomplete picture, as a complete picture, with the radio announcer, TV anchorperson etc.  Pretty soon the incomplete picture is fact.  Oops.  I was wrong, we did mingle our genes with the Neanderthals.  We do share 4% of our DNA with Neanderthals (well not everyone, only those who have non-subsaharan ancestors) if you are a 'pure' human, you have not only never mingled your DNA with a Neanderthal, but you also avoided any human who left the African continent about 150 thousand years ago (eg. anyone of non-African heritage) don't you love genetics, it turns old assumptions on their heads.

Getting God out of the box...

So the expression "Don't put God in a box" often comes too late, God is already in a box, and it takes a while for us to get our heads around a God that isn't what we thought he was.  The first place we go to is the Bible - is this possible?  Would God really have done this? Why was it done this way?  For many life events, a "reworking" of God is really a reworking of our understanding of Him, his Bible and our interpretations.

For the first few Chapters of Genesis this can be tough.  First, I need to go back to a general, lay-person understanding of the Bible.  Without knowing it, Christians constantly weigh scripture and declare it literal or figurative.  In the Old Testament (OT), people didn't know about round-spherical earths that orbited the Sun, so references to corners of the earth, and the sun going around the earth were what ancient people observed, not literal, scientific explanations of space, just don't tell the Church Officials who tried Galileo for doubting earth's universal centrality.  This non-literal reading is fine for eyewitness accounts such as, Psalmists writing songs/poems about God's wonderful world, Joshua extending the day.  The writers observed the sun cross the sky, the flat land stretching away from a mountaintop viewpoint and wrote about it, the point of these stories or psalms is not about geographical accuracy, it is about God's interactions with people, the geo-descriptions are just background information.

Literal interpretations of the bible are generally reserved for accounts of what people did in various situations.  It is historically impossible to verify weather Jezebel was, indeed, the most wicked woman ever, weather Elijah was scared of her, or David really was taken by Abigail's beauty.  History rarely leaves us clues so detailed.  Christians have no reason to doubt these are accurate stories, not just because they are entirely possible, but because the writers were inspired by God to write these details down.  Any Christian will notice that bible stories are very bereft of details.  Stories are given a little detail, but almost no background.  Turning a biblical story into a movie or book requires a lot of imaginative detail to fill out the biblical narrative.  This often gives me, and others, the impression that what few details do show up are important to the inspired biblical narrative, and must have been important for the original audience to hear, and by extension, due to God's inspiration, for us also.

The problem with Genesis 2 is that the story of Adam and Eve is not written by eyewitnesses scribbling  down what they saw and thought.  Genesis is attributed to Moses, a great and godly man who would not make stories about God up.  Therefore, you can't just say "well, that is what they thought about how people got onto the earth back then," because that would make Moses is a storyteller, not a God-inspired writer.  Why would Moses add talking reptiles, trees that have the power to give knowledge and Eve popping out of Adam's rib? He couldn't have been there and thought he saw these things happening, in the same fashion as the Psalmist, who sees the sun circle the earth.

Yet I never really thought about other ancient near eastern culture's creation stories. What did the Egyptians, Babylonians and Canaanites believe about humans?  I had taken Ancient Mesopotamian courses in university, I knew Sumerian literature had some big complicated story about gods and goddesses wanting helpers to do all sorts of work, but it didn't remotely remind me of Adam or Eve, and they made a bunch of humans all at once.  Nothing really sounded close to the Hebrew Adam and Eve, unlike the flood stories, which seemed to be a running theme throughout ancient Asia literature.  But this is what I thought: if all the ancient cultures had a flood story, that just proved the Bible right.  There must have been a world-wide flood.  If Genesis was right about a world-wide flood, surely then, the Adam Eve story was true as well.  Besides, didn't the New Testament writer (practically author) Paul bring up Adam and Eve as if they were literal figures?

God was in my box of literalism.  If His book (the Bible) was going to write about Adam and Eve, then have a (the) New Testament writer bring it up as if they existed, then they must be real and we must be their descendants.  Remove that, and the whole old and new testaments would collapse into a pit of human myths, tales and superstitions.