• Question: How were Adam and Eve made if you need a female human to make a human

    Asked by task520yoga on 14 Mar 2025.
    • Photo: Rachel Edwards

      Rachel Edwards answered on 14 Mar 2025: last edited 14 Mar 2025 14:19

      This is more theology – the bible says that God created Adam and Eve as the first people. Most scientists believe in evolution – which is about how we slowly change and adapt, and humans evolved from different early primates.

    • Photo: Graeme Dykes

      Graeme Dykes answered on 20 Mar 2025: last edited 20 Mar 2025 16:40

      There are no rational explanations when you move into the realms of faith and belief systems.
      This may be the wrong sort of question to ask a Scientist

    • Photo: Zoe Vance

      Zoe Vance answered on 21 Mar 2025:

      You won’t find many scientists that believe Adam and Eve were the first humans, though there are some! Theology aside this is a good question; it’s good to think about the logical implications of things and question how things are possible – very scientific thinking!

      The question of how you get from no humans to humans is interesting without the Adam and Eve angle – how were we not here and then here a few hundred thousand years ago? The answer, as Rachel has said, is evolution. We share ancestors with the other apes that are still around today, but changes happened in each branch of the ape “family tree” that lead to us being humans and them being their species. How a new species evolves is complicated, but usually it’s something along the lines of a smaller group of a species gets cut off somehow – they end up on an island, for example. They evolve over time to suit their environment and eventually are so different from the original species that they are now a different one.

Comments

  • Photo: Andrew M

    Andrew M commented on :

    There is the idea in science of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam – the most recent people from whom all women descend and all men descend.

    Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child, so you can trace back the female lines to the person all women descended from. At the moment Mitochondiral Eve is thought to have lived in Africa around 150,000 years ago. She was made in the usual way we’re all made, the latest in a long line back to the last common ancestor or all life and beyond. With good luck she may have known her mother, her grandmother, her great grandmother. She might have had sisters and aunts. She wasn’t alone. There would have been many other women around who we also descend from, but her’s is the only unbroken line of mothers and daughters. The other lines at some point either had no children or only sons. As time passes some of the lines of her daughters will die out and so who she is, and perhaps where she is from, will change and move forward in time.

    Y-Chromosome Adam is also thought to have lived somewhere in Africa, but perhaps 250,000 to 300,000 years ago. The Y-chromosome is unique to men, so through it you can trace father-son relationships to the most recent father of all men. He too wouldn’t have been alone, and we descend from the other men of the species around at the same time, but he is the most recent one to which there is an unbroken line of fathers and sons to the present, at least for now. Who he is will also one day change as the lines of his sons break.