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Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context)

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Is Adam the father of all human beings, or do they have multiple fathers?

For centuries, Christendom had a simple, biblical answer. Adam was the father of the human race. But during the Age of Discovery, Westerners' contact with other cultures increasingly called into question the chronology, ethnology, and geography of the early chapters of Genesis. The earth was older and its people more diverse and far-flung than the biblical history accounted for.

In the mid-seventh century, Isaac La Peyrere (a heterodox Protestant of Jewish descent) published two treatises--each a pioneering work of biblical criticism--that advanced a novel thesis: there were men before Adam. Adam was the father of the Jews, but other races were descended from other, equally ancient, progenitors. In line with this theory, La Peyrere also advocated a local flood affecting only Adam's semitic descendants rather than covering the whole world.

As La Peyrere's idea took root and grew in succeeding centuries, it mutated in several ironic ways. First, while La Peyrere intended his theory to create safe political space for European Jewry, the pre-Adamite idea caught on with racists--including many otherwise orthodox Christians--who used it to advance the thesis of "Caucasian" superiority to the "Mongoloid" and "Negroid" races on the ground that the former were of Adamite descent while the latter were of pre-Adamite descent. (To be fair, though, not all advocates of pre-Adamitism were racist, including La Peyrere himself; and not all advocates of the biblical record were egalitarians.)

Second, while La Peyrere was heterodox and a pioneering biblical critic, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his idea found a home among theologically conservative Christians who used pre-Adamitism to reconcile Scripture with emerging scientific discoveries, including the geological record of the earth's old age, the paleontological record of long-deceased animal species, and the evolution of the human species itself. Not all Christians took this route, of course, but many leading intellectuals in Britain and America did.

Third, La Peyrere's thesis contributed to the secularization of science by detaching most of human history from the biblical account and making it a fit object of historical and scientific study rather than textual exegesis. Increasingly, therefore, professionalizing scientists stopped thinking in terms of the biblical account of human origins and spoke more broadly of the human species' monogenetic or polygenetic origins. Only religious conservatives still used the language of Adamic or pre-Adamite.

Fourth, while La Peyrere's original idea was clearly polygenetic--with Adam as the father of Jews, and all other groups having equally ancient fathers--Darwin introduced a novel element, namely, pre-Adamite monogenism. All are descended from an aboriginal human pair who themselves evolved from human or humanoid ancestors. One of the key theological concerns of orthodox Christians was to protect the doctrines of original sin and redemption through Christ. The unity of the human race (monogenism) went hand in glove with these doctrinal concerns. For those Christians impressed by evolutionary accounts of human origins, Darwin's pre-Adamite monogenism allowed them to eat their scientific cake and have it theologically, too.

These ironies make for a very messy history, which David N. Livingstone narrates with clarity and skill in Adam's Ancestors, an excellent academic treatment of an idea that once roiled the intelligentsia but is now--for most--intellectual arcana. Without an understanding of this history, however, it is difficult to understand the development of the science of human origins in the West, not to mention the development of biblical criticism there. If you want to understand the interaction of Scripture and science in Western history, this is a great book to start with.

This comprehensive study treats the various manifestations of the theory that there did (or does) exist a pre-Adamic humanity. Some versions of this conjecture reflected skepticism about the Bible, others were attempts to defend the Bible from Darwinism, and still others served simply as props for "scientific racism." Livingstone thoughtfully explores a number of significant issues in this fine work.

Nevertheless, my guess is that most readers will mine the book for its information rather than read it straight through for enjoyment. Although Livingstone writes in a clear academic style, clarity does not necessarily make a book (in the words of one pre-publication reviewer) a "great read."

ADAM'S ANCESTORS: RACE, RELIGION & THE POLITICS OF HUMAN ORIGINS provides both college-level and general-interest lending libraries with a fine history of non-Adamic humanity and the debates surrounding it, considering the alternative notion of Adam's descendants: that humans inhabited the Earth before or alongside Adam, and their descendants still occupy the planet. Religion, science and anthropological concerns are all presented in an outstanding survey.

This is a very well documented (896 footnotes) history of proposals of the existence of human beings prior to Adam and Eve, starting with Origen (ca. 185-ca. 254) and continuing through Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676), the impact of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", and progressing up to the present time.

David Livingstone covers the history of important issues around whether human beings were or were not one species and how these views were used to argue for and against slavery and racial intermixing. Pre-adamites are tied to the issue of one origin and therefore one species of humans (monogenesis) vs. multiple origins and therefore multiple races of humans (polygenesis) which can then be "ranked" and used to justify slavery. He discusses how the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 made polygenesis less likely, at which point pre-adamism became the vehicle of choice for those interested in justifying white supremacy. He also discusses the various ways that pre-adamites figure into the accounting for differences in races and languages.

Along the way, Livingstone presents a history of monogenesis and polygenesis in the UK and in the USA. He does not go into the theological issues raised by pre-adamites, such as the Fall, death before sin, or references to Adam in the New Testament. Livingstone finishes up by discussing the continuing legacy of Adam's ancestors: (1) continuing to be employed within an antievolutionary framework, (2) enabling reapproachment with Darwinian biology, and (3) continued use of pre-adamite theories to justify white supremacy. The book includes 30 pages of Notes, a 31-page Bibliography, and a 15-page index.

This book gives a very thorough history of the issue in Christian and secular thought over the past two thousand years. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the current debate over the historicity of Adam and Eve.

"Adam's Ancestors" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Livingstone's book interview ran here as cover feature on February 6, 2009.