Everyone who has had the audacity to write on the origin of humans beyond the simple affirmation that they were created by God has had their writings consigned to the waste bin. Time changes what we know of earlier humans as new discoveries are made. The Neanderthals are no longer thought of as mentally dull and slow as they were once and proverbially made out to be. So, knowing the certain fate of such an enterprise, why bother?
Because faith seeks understanding, even if only tentatively. Every generation has to make sense of what they find where they find them. We are no exception. The danger lies not in making tentative synthesis but in being dogmatic about our reconstruction. Bishop James Ussher's proposal of the year 4004 BC as the year of the universe's creation was not improper. In fact, in his time, it was one of the most learned piece of writing. The folly, and the joke it has become among non-believers, consists in printing the date into the margin of the Bible giving the impression that it was a piece of canonical fact, to be subscribed to as if one's salvation rested on it.
The proposed reading here attempts to understand the question "where did Cain get his wife from?" Any proposal of this kind will have to resort to some kind of presuppositions and/or speculation. Either we import it into our understanding and exposition cladestinely or we do it openly with the humility that it is tentative. We prefer to do it honestly and openly, and here it is. You are, of course, not bound to accept the proposal given here. What is presented here represents only one attempt that tries to take in as much of whatever evidences that are now available to us, both from Scriptures and from palaeoanthropology. If it stretches your mental fibres in reading it, it would have done its job.
Hominin fossils have provided the primary evidences for stitching together the story of human origins (or evolution) since the science of paleoanthropology began. That continues to be the case. While our understanding from the fossils continue to expand, they are sketchy at best. In the last few decades, however, molecular biology, and genomics in particular, has added evidences that have revolutionized our understanding of our relationship with the rest of the natural world, and shows overwhelmingly that it is no longer honest to deny that we humans are—biologically speaking—the product of evolution. Our genome, the code book of instructions that make us what we are as a species, reads like a history of where we have come from, whether we are speaking of ourselves as individuals or as a species. As individuals, genome analysis can tell us the various people groups from which we are descended. As a species, they can tell us where we stand in relation to other species: apes, monkeys, etc.
Mitochondrial Eve
All of us are, by now, familiar with the fact that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) are the genetic codes that make every living organism what it uniquely is. The codes are, in fact, sequences (think of words) made up from four basic units or 'bases' (think of letters)—A (adenine), C (cytocine), G (guanine) and T (thymine)—held together by a sugar-phosphate backbone. These strings of sequences are then twirled in pairs into the famous double-helix that has come to be the signiture of DNA. These strands of DNA are then repacked into strands to form chromosomes found in the nucleus of every living cell. During the reproductive process the reproductive cells—the eggs and sperms—divide into two, each holding only half of the original number of chromosomes (i.e., they are 'haploid'). The fusion of the egg with the sperm restores the full complement of the chromosomes characteristic of each organism. This, then, is how the basic hereditary mechanism in living organisms works.
The story of mitochondrial Eve is altogether different. All living cells contain numerous minute components called mitochonria, visible only under high magnification. Mitochondrias are amazing organelles, the power plants of the cells and, therefore, vital to the proper functioning of the cell and, therefore, the organism. What interests us here, however, is the fact that mitochondrias 1) contain a form of DNA that is totally different from nucleic DNA and that is not changed in any way by the reproductive process and 2) they are inherited only from the mothers. What this means is that, by looking closely at this mitochondrial DNA (or mtDNA) we can trace what the outline of the female side of our human story looks like.
A group of molecular biologists at the University of California at Berkeley took up this idea, analysing mtDNA from 147 women from a broad range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including Asians, aboriginal Australians, Africans, as well as Caucasians. In 1987 they published their findings in Nature, the foremost British scientific journal. "All these mitochondrial DNAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived about 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa," they said. All present-day humans "are the descendants of that African population."2 Their findings were at first contested, most noisily by those who work with fossils. Further studies by the group, as well as work using a different test by another team at Harvard, came to the same conclusion. We all came from a single woman living in Africa some 200,000 years ago.
The 'Y' of Adam
If there is now a mitochondrial Eve, is there an equivalent of an Adam, and how do we find him?
Yes, there is.
The human cells contain 23 pairs of chromosomes. The pairs in them are identical to one another. In one pair—the so-called 'sex chromosomes'—the pair differs, and they are called the X-chromosome and the Y-chromosome. Only the guys carry the Y-chromosome, which means that they contain only genetic material unique to the male line. Like the mitochondrial DNA, this now gives us also a way of tracing the human story along the male line. The conclusion? All living humans trace their origin to a single male; our "Adam"!
There you have it — we are all descended from Adam and Eve!
Alas, things are not so easy, because "Y-rated Adam" lived ### years ago, which meant that our mitochondrial Eve and "x-rated Adam" missed one another by ### years.
Is there any way by which we can square what we now know with the biblical narrative? The answer is no. Not with enough certainty to warrant a square at any rate. But they do offer tantalizing suggestions.
Martin Meredith, Born in Africa. The Quest for the Origins of Human Life. London/New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Low Chai Hok, ©Alberith, 2019
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