Sunday 16 July 2017

When Did the First Human Appear on Earth?

It sounds like a natural question, right? My parents are human... and my grandparents are also human... and my grandparents’ parents are human, too... But if we go back in time like this, when does the chain of our ancestors end? If we were created, as for example the Bible says, then of course the chain ends at our creation point. But suppose for a moment that we were not created at a point in time as the Bible tells us, but evolved rather gradually, as science tells us — then what? The chain can’t go backwards forever, because we know there were no human beings, for example, 1 million years ago.So? Doesn’t there have to be a First Human even in the case of evolution, a pair perhaps — an “Adam” and an “Eve” — who became the progenitors of our kind? Doesn’t the biblical story have to be true anyway?

Nonetheless, some readers disagree, and argue for the creation of the First Human even under the assumption of evolution, as I just explained in the previous paragraph. They see the conclusion as necessarily following by common sense and pure logic. I would like to show in the present page how it can be logically possible that there was no First Human. The reasoning is simple, but we need an analogy to make it easier to understand.
Let’s think about something related: the evolution of a language instead of the evolution of humans. Let’s use a particular language as an example: the evolution of Greek, from the ancient, to the modern language. (Don’t worry, you don’t need to know a single word of that language to understand this analogy, guaranteed! ) I’ll tell you how Greek evolved from ancient to modern, without ever having a “first modern Greek speaker”. What we’ll learn about Greek is true for every other language that evolved from an older to a later stage (including English, for example), but I prefer Greek because I am more familiar with the evolution facts of that language, and so I will not make false statements. But the point is that, not only it doesn’t matter which language we use as example, but also the analogy carries over to what we are interested at: just as there was no first speaker of a modern language, there was no First Human either. And the analogy is true even in some of its details! Let’s see first what happened to speakers of Greek.

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