Were there any people before Adam and Eve?

Views About the First People

• No. According to the Biblical Creation, Adam was the first human, created by the Lord on the 6th day. Eve was the first woman.
  

• Despite the generally human qualities assigned to God by Biblical authors, he is usually not regarded as a "person".

• We do not know who was the first person to live, but it was long before the time attributed to Adam and Eve.
  
  Humans evolved over the last two million years in Africa and our primitive ancestors gradually migrated to Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. There is ample evidence of this process and skeletal remains of a large number of primitive individuals have been found and dated scientifically. For this reason, most Jews and Christians do not believe that the story of Adam and Eve needs to be taken literally. When exactly our ancestors first became "people" is somewhat arbitrary. Chimpanzees are arguably "self-aware" and deserving of the denotation "persons".
  
  One could interpret the story of Adam and Eve (the first man and woman) as being the first to know good from evil (eating from the tree of knowledge between good and evil being a symbol of this).

• There are essentially two models which answer this question.
  
  The first model is the creation account from the Bible, which records that Adam and Eve constitute the first and only humans created 'in the beginning' as part of God's original creation. In the case of the people of course, already created elements were used as constituent parts of both Adam and Eve.
  
  Under a second model, Adam and Eve were not the first people. Under this model, which has very scant and conflicting evidence, there are various proposed people existing before Adam and Eve.

• The wording in Genesis Chapter 4, which clearly identifies the technologies existing within a few generations of Adam and Eve, suggests that they were certainly not the first people. These technologies took many thousands of years to develop, not just a few generations. The belief that Adam and Eve were the first people became erroneously insitutionalized in Christian dogma before the sciences of paleontology and archaeology existed and with a correct interpretation of the Book of Genesis, using its own words, most of the conflicts between science and theology disappear. God plainly and clearly states that animals were made on Day 5. Man is an animal. On Day 6, He says, NOW let us make man in Our image. That's like Henry Ford saying Now let us make Model Ts in colors other than black. Of course Ford made Model Ts before, as God made men before.

• There is no need for any reason to postulate the existence of anyone before Adam and Eve. It creates more problems than it solves in terms of the evidence. The absence of multi-billions of human remains if human history was as long as claimed would then require explanation. Also, the human population is also far too small and actually matches, conservatively, the c.6000 years of earth history that the Bible proposes.
  
• Genesis 4 makes it CLEAR that Cain went to build not a home or a farm or a village or a town, but a CITY. For whom? The land of Nod is mentioned, meanig the existence of political delineations. For whom?
  
  Another close descendant teaches the harp and the organ. To teach music there must be multiple instruments, a repertoire, students, and, of course, audience demand.

This answer is closed to changes. This is done in rare cases when questions are being vandalized or answers have become debates. Email WikiAnswers @ Answers.com if you would like it to be reopened.

First answer by ID1276774779. Last edit by GBartthenerd. Contributor trust: 27 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 30 [recommend question]