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Were Adam and Eve Africans?
By
Our Reporter - 06-08-2002 |
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The Book of Genesis, a constituent of the Bible, tells us that God created the earth in six days and that it was on the sixth day that he created a man called Adam. Out of Adam’s rib he created Eve.
We also learn that there were heavy flooods in which most of the earth’s creatures perished. However, Noah managed to save a female and a male from each species and so he saved the animal kingdom from extinction.
Where on earth did these things take place? People brought up in the religions of Abraham’s descendants; Judaism, Christianity and Islam assume that these things happened in what is now known as the Middle East, possibly Iraq.
Those who have read the writings of Charles Darwin and his followers dismiss the Adam and Noah stories as myths. They are currently busy reconstructing history scientifcally much to the annoyance of some Bible scholars. The findings of these secular scholars and investigators point to the fact that if ever there was one man and one woman from whom the human race sprang that couple and the garden of Eden were in Africa.
First, we must go back to Charles Darwin. In 1836 after returning from a five year biological study in South America, on a ship called “The Beagle,” Darwin immersed himself in the study of all sorts of animals — sheep, cattle, pigs, dogs, cats, poultry, peacocks and many more.
At the end of it he firmly came to feel that the creatures of the earth did not have the shapes that their distant ancestors had. Environment had influenced the evolution of the creatures. There had been and there is a struggle for existence or survival. Those which could not adapt to the harsh conditions perished. Nature selected the fittest for survival.
Such was the conviction about the Biblical stories of creation that in Britain Archbishop Usher and Dr John Lightfoot of Cambridge University, using mystical calculations, came to the conclusion that God created the world at 9:00 am on Sunday 23rd October 4004 BC.
Before going to Cambridge University out of which he came with a third class BA, Darwin had never questioned beliefs like these. But now he felt the earth was older and that creation was by evolution and not a one-week act.
He wrote: “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive and as consequently there is a recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being if it varies however slightly in any manner profitable to itself.....it will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected....this preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and by the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection or survival of the fittest.”
In his writings the author of the famous book The Origin of Species suggested that human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor. The clergy and some scholars could not accept this as a possible truth. They attacked Darwin saying that he was implying that mankind desended from apes. They saw this as contrary to what the bible was saying, that God created man in his own image.
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Oxford in 1860 the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, sarcastically asked T. H. Huxley an ardent propagator of Darwin’s theories whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed to be descended from apes. Huxley answered the clergyman in a manner to expose Wilberforce as a stupid and ignorant man despite his status.
There are still people who keep on denouncing Darwin’s ideas just as there are still some who deny that the sun is the centre of the Universe. However, since that time scientisits have dug up the earth in various parts of the world. They have discovered fossils of creatures now extinct which point to the possibility that some of those creatures were the ancestors of mankind. We read of the hominids and neanderthals.
The oldest fossils that point to the remote ancestors of mankind have been found in Africa, especially East Africa. An authority on African History, Basil Davidson, wrote as far back as 1959 in his book Old Africa Rediscovered: “Manlike apes lived in Africa a million years ago...that Africa may hold the answer to the earliest development of man himself is also suggested by evidence from East Africa, mainly Uganda and Kenya, this leading to a claim by some anthropologists, so far not denied, that Africa was the cradle of humanity. The principal reason for thinking that Homo sapiens occurred first of all in Africa is that stone stools have been recovered from deposits laid down during the earliest of these pluvials whereas stone tools in Europe turn up only much later.”
Nowadays it is generally agreed that it is in Africa that these queer creatures of the past, the hominids etc, evolved into Homo sapiens. It was from Africa that mankind spread to the rest of the earth. Thus Africa, the last continent to be colonised, started as a coloniser of other continents.
What is in doubt nowadays is whether East Africa was the birthplace of mankind. The latest discoveries point to Chad in the middle of Africa. There Michael Brunet of the University of Poitiers, France, and his Chadian Assistant Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye have unearthed the skull of a hominid that died six or seven million years ago. It is known scientifically as “Sahela nthropus tchadensis” translated as “Sahel hominid from Chad. In a local Chadian language it is also called “Toumai” meaning “Hope of Life.”
This discovery is reported by Time Magazine of July 22, where we read inter alia: “Paleontologists are scrambling to digest the implication of the remarkable find. It may simply be that the discovery fills in the evolutionary sequence, the so called family tree...that leads to modern humans...Many scientists now believe that the emergence of humans may not have been a neat succession of increasingly modern-looking ancestors suggested by conventional hominid family trees but rather an evolutionary brawl with multiple species fighting for survival.”
In view of this, the consensus among scientists and anthropologists is that mankind originated in Africa. Chad now has snatched the cradle from Uganda and Kenya but Malawi at the tip of the East African Rift Valley has never been subjected to the same detailed searching as the countries up north.
In view of these findings how should we view the story of Adam and Eve and the six day creation process? It is religious truth. One can retain one’s faith by recalling that St Augustine of Hippo wrote in his “Confessions” that a thousand years are in God’s eyes but a day gone. A psalmist had said the same thing before. Now that we are better acquainted with the marvels of time and space we can say that what we call a millenium is to God a mere second. The six days mentioned in the Bible were days in the eyes of God.
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