Who Were Adam and Eve?

2. Who Were Adam and Eve? Apes, Humans, or Myths?

3. Outline • Human Evolution • Special Creation of Humans • Which view best accounts for the data?

4. Darwin’s Views of Humans • “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.”—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 521.

5. Darwin’s Views of Humans • “With respect to the absence of fossil remains, serving to connect man with his ape-like progenitors, no one will lay much stress on this fact who reads Sir C. C Lyell’s discussion, where he shows that in all the vertebrae classes the discovery of fossil remains has been a very slow and fortuitous process...

6. Darwin’s Views of Humans • …Nor should it be forgotten that those regions which are the most likely to afford remains connecting man with some extinct ape-like creature, have not as yet been searched by geologists.”—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 521.

7. Human Evolution: The Evidence • Humans have “Junk DNA” in their genome • Transitional Hominid Fossils • Humans share 98% of their DNA with chimpanzees • “Ardi” fills in another “missing link”

8. Transitional Hominid Fossils • “Homo/ergaster/erectus, of which we have many fossil specimens, is a very persuasive halfway link, no longer missing, between Homo sapiens today and Homo habilis two million years ago, which is in turn a beautiful link back to Australopithecus…

9. Transitional Hominid Fossils • …three million years ago, which, as we saw, could pretty well be described as an upright-walking chimpanzee. How many links do you need, before you concede that they are no longer ‘missing’?”—Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 196.

10. Transitional Hominid Fossils • Homo habilis The earliest known species of the genus was Homo habilis, a fully erect hominid. • Homo erectus About 1.8 million years ago Homo erectus appeared, a large hominid standing 150 to 170 cm (5 to 5.5 feet) tall, with a low but distinct forehead and strong browridges. • Neanderthals Arose about 150,000 years ago. • Cro-Magnons Discovered by workmen in 1868 at Cro-Magnon, in the village of Les Eyzies in France. The estimated age of the site is 30,000 years

11. Hominid Fossil Skulls

12. “Junk” DNA • Most of the genetic code in humans is useless. • It is simply a mess left over from evolutionary changes. • Why would an Intelligent Designer produce such a code full of so many errors?

13. Humans Are 98% Chimps • The 98% sequence overlap for proteins and DNA proves that humans and chimps arose from a common ancestor some time in the relatively recent past. • This split occurred due to mutations in each of the species’ genetic material

14. “Ardi”—Another “Missing Link” Found • “Ardi” is short for Ardipithecus. • It dates even earlier than “Lucy,” which is a popular name for a creature called Australopithecusafarensis.

15. Is Human Evolution a Fact?

16. Transitional Hominid Fossils? • Again, evolutionists call the alleged “missing links” hominids. • However, from the Creation perspective, these were not “missing links” but were merely creatures that God created that later went extinct.

17. Transitional Hominid Fossils? • The transitional forms linking modern humans to the hominids are still missing, just like they were in Darwin’s time. • Many of the “transitional forms” lived at the same time and sometimes in the same areas.

18. Homo habilis and Homo erectus Co-Existed • “Here we describe two new cranial fossils from the Koobi Fora Formation, east of Lake Turkana in Kenya, that have bearing on the relationship between species of early Homo. A partial maxilla assigned to H. habilis reliably demonstrates that this species survived until later than previously recognized,making an anagenetic relationship with H. erectus unlikely.”—”Implications of New Early Homo Fossils from Ileret, East of Lake Turkana, Kenya,” Nature 448, 688-691 (9 August 2007)

19. Homo erectus and Modern Humans Co-Existed • There's no way modern humans could be direct descendants of Homo erectus,’ said Kenneth Mowbray, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City . ‘The dating is tricky, but the Java material suggests that H. sapiens and H. erectus overlapped in time.H. erectus can't stay the same and be an ancestor at the same time,’ he said.” – Java Skull Raises Questions On Human Family Tree,” National Geographic News (2003)

20. Neanderthals and Modern Humans Co-Existed • David Caramelli explains: “During the late Pleistocene, early anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe with the anatomically archaic Neanderthals for some thousand years…

21. Neanderthals and Modern Humans Co-Existed • …This discontinuity is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that both Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans contributed to the current European gene pool.”[1] “Evidence for a genetic discontinuity between Neandertals and 24,000-year-old anatomically modern Europeans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (2003)

22. Did Neanderthals Bury Their Dead? • Pollen was found underneath one Neanderthal and this led some scientists to conclude that Neanderthals put flowers on their graves. • This is only one specimen and pollen could have made its way into the grave through other means (i.e., wind blowing it).

23. Burial Does Not Necessarily Imply Spiritual Beliefs • Elephants pay homage to the bones of their dead, gently touching the skulls and tusks with their trunks and feet, according to the first systematic study of elephant empathy for the dead.The finding provides the first hard evidence to support stories of elephant mourning, in which the pachyderms are said to congregate at elephant cemeteries, drawn by the bones of their kin.” Rosella Lorenzi, “Elephants Mourn Their Dead,” Discovery News (2005)

24. Elephants Bury Their Dead • Evolutionists do not think humans are closely related to elephants, so this demonstrates that burial does not necessarily imply a relationship between humans and Neanderthals.

25. Cro-Magnons • Cro-Magnons was simply a term for describing anatomically modern humans.

26. Bone Shapes and “Transitions” • “In closing our discussion of human evolution, it is important to note that recognition of species in Homo is based entirely on morphology…It is possible that we are observing phyletic change within a single species through time, and using the species names only to denote different grades of evolution.”—Integrated Principles of Zoology. 12th ed. (2004), 604.

27. Evolution??

28. “The Human Fossil Record Is Still Poor” • “We have to admit that the fossil record connecting the upright-walking ape Australopithecus to the (presumably) quadrapedal ancestor that we share with chimpanzees is still poor. We don’t know how our ancestors rose on to their hind legs. We need more fossils.” Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, 204-205.

29. Human Evolution? • Homo sapiens, or sometimes Homo sapiens sapiens, refer to humans who were physically identical to humans today. • Evolutionists do not know how humans evolved. • The standard theory of human evolution that is presented in textbooks is outdated.

30. “Junk” DNA Is Not Junk • In the October 20, 2005 issue of Nature, Peter Andolfatto, an assistant professor of biology at UCSD, conducted research that demonstrates that “Junk” DNA is not really junk after all:“Genetic material derisively called “junk” DNA because it does not contain the instructions for protein-coding genes and appears to have little or no function is actually critically important to an organism’s evolutionary survival, according to a study conducted by a biologist at UCSD…

31. “Junk” DNA Is Not Junk • …In fact, 40 to 70 percent of new mutations that arise in non-coding DNA fail to be incorporated by this species, which suggests that these non-protein-coding regions are not ‘junk,’ but are somehow functionally important to the organism.” —Kim McDonald, “UCSD Study Shows ‘Junk’ DNA Has Evolutionary Importance” (2005)

32. 98% Drops To 86.7% • Tatsuya Anzai conducted a comparative study and concluded:“However, and importantly, this 98.6% sequence identity drops to only 86.7% taking into account the multiple insertions/deletions (indels) dispersed throughout the region.” • The abstract of this journal article is available online at: http://www.pnas.org/content/100/13/7708.abstract .

33. Of Mice and Men • Gene-to-Gene DNA comparisons for humans and mice reveal roughly an 80% sequence similarity. —Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium, “Initial Sequencing and Comparative Analysis of the Mouse Genome,” Nature 420 (2002): 520-562.

34. Are We Closer to Chimps or Orangutans? • “There is no theory holding that molecular similarity necessarily implies an evolutionary relationship; molecular studies often exclude orangutans and focus on a limited selection of primates without an adequate "outgroup" for comparison; and molecular data that contradict the idea that genetic similarity denotes relation are often dismissed.” —”Humans More Closely Related to Orangutans Than Chimps, Study Suggests,” Journal of Biogeography (June 18, 2009)

35. Are Humans 98% Chimps? • The genetic similarities between chimpanzees and humans would just as easily be explained by a Creator using the same building blocks and designs to make different creatures. • More recent research from the year 2003 indicates that humans are only 86.7 percent genetically similar to chimpanzees. • Are we 80% mouse?

36. What About “Ardi”? • “Though Ardipithecus is not itself this last common ancestor, itlikely shared many of this ancestor's characteristics.”

37. What About “Ardi”? • “Until now, researchers have generally assumedthat chimpanzees, gorillas and other modern African apes have retained many of the traits of the last ancestor they shared with humans – in other words, this presumed ancestor was thought to be much more chimpanzee-like than human-like.” 

38. What About “Ardi”? • Ardipithecus challenges these assumptions, however. …Overall, the findings suggest that hominids and African apes have each followed different evolutionary pathways, and we can no longer consider chimps as "proxies" for our last common ancestor.” • In sum, “Ardi” exposes just how tenuous human evolutionary theory really is.

39. Creation Predictions • Humans are “overly endowed” (reflect God’s image). • Humanity traces back to one woman and one man. • Humans originated in a single location in or near the Middle East. • God created humanity at the “just-right” time. • Longer life spans prior to the Flood

40. Humans Are “Overly Endowed” • God created humans in His image (Genesis 1:27) . • “Implement crafting developed rapidly, and human culture became enriched with aesthetics, artistry, and sophisticated language.”—Integrated Principles of Zoology. 12th ed., 604. • Humans have discovered mathematics and used math to explain the universe’s properties. • Humans study philosophy. • None of these are necessary for survival!

41. One Woman and One Man? • Mitochondrial-DNA studies suggest that humanity emerged in a single location from a single female, or group of females, in a small population. • Y-Chromosomal Adam

42. Single Point of Origin in the Middle East • Humans most likely originated somewhere in East Africa. • The Bible explicitly states that God intervened early in human history to move some people groups great distances from their point of origin, while others remained relatively close to their starting place (Genesis 5-11).

43. Humans Came on the Scene at the “Just-Right” Time • Humans exist at the perfect time to observe most of the universe’s history. • The universe is expanding as time passes, and the early stages of the universe’s history will be out of view later in time. • Good climate time due to Earth’s slower rotation rate. • Winds would have been stronger on Earth in the distant past.

44. Long Life Spans Before the Flood • “In Badtibira, Enmenluana reigned for 43,200 years; Enmengalana reigned for 28,800 years, Dumuzi, the shepherd, reigned for 36,000 years… Then the flood swept over (the land).”—An excerpt from the Cuneiform prism with the Sumerian King List, ca. 1740 B.C.; Old Babylonian period. Mesopotamia. Cuneiform inscription in Sumerian.

45. Long Life Spans Before the Flood

46. Conclusion • The Special Creation perspective more adequately accounts for the known data.

47. Helpful Resource • Who Was Adam?: A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Man, by Drs. Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross (NavPress, 2005)