Excerpted From
The Genealogical Adam & Eve
By S. Joshua Swamidass
Excerpted from The Genealogical Adam & Eve by S. Joshua Swamidass, this work explores how universal genealogical ancestors of everyone alive could have arisen as recently as a few thousand years ago. We can now begin to assess our hypothesis: Could Adam and Eve, ancestors of us all, have lived in the Middle East as recently as six thousand years ago? What are the ranges of times they could have lived? Already, it seems as if this may not be as ridiculous a hypothesis as we first imagined.
Surprisingly, the distinction between genetic and genealogical ancestry in the 2004 Nature study went largely unnoticed in theological circles. David Opderbeck published a blog article in 2010 noting this distinction, suggesting that universal ancestry from a recent Adam and Eve might be valuable to theology. Jon Garvey followed in 2011 with reflections on how this distinction might be useful. Later, Kenneth Kemp, Gregg Davidson, and Andrew Loke independently intuited that genetic ancestry was not the whole story. While the instinct to think beyond genetics occasionally surfaced, it was often dismissed as a variation of polygenesis—a theory frequently associated with racism. This rush to judgment prevented further inquiry, and some authors even excluded mention of recent genealogical ancestry from their summaries of the field. These objections, however, were rooted in a deep misunderstanding of both the science of ancestry and the monogenesis tradition. As Olson and Kendall noted, universal ancestry actually demonstrates that polygenesis is false, yet the mythology of isolated races remains a powerful counterintuitive force.
In light of the 2004 Nature study, the genealogical hypothesis seems plausible, but two scientific gaps remain. First, we must determine if Adam and Eve could be ancestors of everyone alive “to the ends of the earth” at a specific point in the past. While published literature confirms we have universal genealogical ancestors for the present day, it does not automatically account for everyone alive in, for example, A.D. 1. To understand how we extrapolate these findings backward to consider universal ancestry at an earlier date, consider this universal ancestry interview.
Second, the estimates so far are for the most recent of all universal ancestors. This is a tiny number of individuals, possibly in specific areas of the globe, and only arising at some narrow window of time in the past. It would be almost inconceivably lucky for Adam and Eve to be part of this tiny group of people. Nothing in our hypothesis, however, requires them to be the most recent. Instead, we just want them to be universal ancestors, not necessarily the most recent ones.
Somehow, we want to know the time at which most people are universal ancestors of everyone at a later date. This is a more conservative approach than using the most recent date; it pushes any estimates we make of when Adam and Eve could have lived to more ancient times. The advantage of this approach, however, is that it gives us an estimate that does not rely on luck or miraculous intervention.
These are the gaps I bridged in my contributions. In mid-2017, I put out the basic details of the genealogical hypothesis, first in an informal presentation, then in a book review in a theological journal. It became clear that the proposal was important for theology, but it needed further development. In March of 2018, I authored an article, “The Overlooked Science of Genealogical Ancestry,” in an interdisciplinary journal, Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. This paper shows how the findings of the 2004 Nature study can be extrapolated to test our hypothesis, bridging these last gaps. This analysis, accidentally, demonstrated that there would be no evidence against the de novo creation of Adam and Eve within a population. This, perhaps, was an even bigger surprise, as we soon explore.
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Excerpted from The Genealogical Adam & Eve by S. Joshua Swamidass. Copyright (c) 2019 by S. Joshua Swamidass. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. IVPress.com