In the last post, we looked at the biblical account of the garden of Eden (Gen. 2-3) and saw that every single detail matches the history of the Persian Gulf oasis about 12,000 years ago. Many scientific fields from archeology to paleoclimatology to 14C dating come together to support the biblical story. Therefore, contrary to anti-scientific readings of Genesis like young-earth creationism, the Bible and modern science actually corroborate each another. Here we’ll examine the biblical account of the world before the Flood, described in Genesis 4-6, to see if it matches with what we know from science.
Cain and Abel
After Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden of Eden for sinning, and face the punishments of patriarchy and agriculture (Gen. 3:16-19), we’re next told about their children Cain and Abel. Abel is said to be a sheepherder, and Cain is a crop grower (4:2). Based on the archeology and paleoclimatology of the Persian Gulf basin, we’re able to date Adam and Eve’s expulsion to approximately 10,000 BC. [1] Based on 14C dating of archaeological finds, the introduction of agriculture in the Near East can be dated to ~10,000 BC, while the domestication of sheep became widespread before ~8,500 BC based on Y-chromosome clocks. [2] This fits the timeline of the biblical account.
More interesting is the account of Cain’s curse after he murdered his brother Abel. God punishes Cain by making him unable to till the soil and forcing him to wander the land for the rest of his life.
Cain said to Yahweh, “My punishment is more than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me will kill me.”
Then Yahweh said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And Yahweh put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.
Then Cain went away from the presence of Yahweh and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch, and he built a city and named it after his son Enoch. (Gen. 4:13-17)
This is only one generation from Adam, and we’re only told of one other child that he had apart from Cain and Abel (Gen. 5:3). So who are the unnamed people that Cain is worried will kill him? And where did he find his wife? And how are there enough people east of Eden for him to build a settlement with? [3]
This entire passage strongly suggests the existence of other people outside the garden of Eden; it's not conclusive, as a just-so story could be concocted about Adam and Eve having hundreds of children before Cain is expelled, but it's certainly compelling. Although the Bible doesn’t explicitly say that other humans lived before Adam and Eve, nor does it explicitly contradict this possibility. [4] The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens have been found in the Jebel Irhoud cave in Morocco, and two independent dating methods (thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance) arrive at a date of ~300,000 years before present for these fossils. [5] Thus, even if we assume that other species of Homo weren’t ‘true humans’ by the biblical definition, as some old-earth creationists have claimed, humans existed hundreds of thousands of years before Adam and Eve. This is supported biblically by the Cain narrative, which places other humans in “the land of Nod, east of Eden,” at the same time as Adam and Eve.
Symbolic Ages of Patriarchs?
Following the account of Cain’s curse and his descendants, we’re given a genealogy from Abel’s son Seth to the patriarch Noah (Gen. 5). Unlike other genealogies in the Bible, this one gives the ages of the patriarchs at the time that their children were born and when they died. However, the patriarchs’ ages when their children were born (65-187 yo) and when they died (777-969 yo) are extremely high! From the skeletons of humans during this period, especially the wear of the teeth, we can tell that the average age at death was between 20 and 30 years old. [6] So how can we explain these high ages?
First, it’s possible that the patriarchs really did live this long because God kept them alive. Science can’t discount the possibility of miracles. However, this is scripturally difficult because there’s no indication of any miracles in the passage itself. There are other biblical reasons to doubt the literality of these old ages as well. For one, Abraham is said to have died at “a good old age… full of years” at 175 yo (Gen. 25:8), but if the ages are literal, then he lived alongside all of his much more long-lived ancestors all the way back to Noah. In fact, three of his ancestors, Shem, Shelah, and Eber, would have outlived him!
Furthermore, all of the thirty numbers in Genesis 5 end in significant numbers: 0, 5 (60 months), 7 (number of perfection), 2 (5 + 7 = 12), and 9 (5 + 7 + 7 = 19). Although these numbers may not seem significant in our culture, it’s as though every age ended in an even number, for example. The chance of this occurring randomly is less than 1 in 1 billion. [7] This indicates that the numbers had symbolic meaning and shouldn’t be interpreted literally. None of the ages in Genesis 11 end in 1 or 6, which isn’t quite as significant, but still comes out to a ~1 in 650,000 chance. [7]
In fact, in almost every ancient Near Eastern culture, the ‘patriarchs’ of the culture were given artificially elongated lifespans with symbolic value as a sign of respect. For example, the Sumerian King List and Turin King List (Egypt) begin with reign lengths in the thousands of years and slowly decrease from there. Many of these are known to have been real kings from the archeological record, such as Enmerkar and Gilgamesh, but they didn’t have reigns in the hundreds of years. In Egypt, “he died aged 110” was actually an epitaph for someone considered outstandingly selfless, not meant as a literal age. [8] Significantly, this is said to have been Joseph and Joshua’s age at death (Gen. 50:26; Josh. 24:29), and their lives marked the beginning and end of the Egyptian exile.
Thus, it’s most likely that the ages given in Genesis 5 and 11, and other extreme ages throughout the early part of the Old Testament, were symbolic in a way that was accepted in the ancient Near East as a way to venerate one’s ancestors. If the ages of the patriarchs were symbolic, this also raises the possibility that the Genesis genealogies contain significant gaps, as many other genealogies throughout the Bible do. [9] This explains how Adam and Eve could have lived as long ago as 10,000 BC, even though a literal reading of the Genesis genealogies would place their creation around ~4,000 BC.
Pre-Flood Wickedness
Before the Flood, the world is said to have been an extremely violent and evil place. According to Genesis 6:5, “the wickedness of humans was great in the land and… every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” The reason that the Flood was sent is because “the land was corrupt in God’s sight, and the land was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11). A group of people called nephilim, who are said to have been the offspring of the “sons of God” and “daughters of Adam,” were “the heroes of old, warriors of renown” (Gen. 6:4), much like the demigods of other mythologies.
As it happens, there’s actually genetic evidence of this period of extreme violence! Based on an analysis of Y-chromosome diversity among modern humans, we can tell that there was a severe bottleneck among men (but not among women) beginning about 10,000 years ago. [10] In the ancient Near East, which is “the land” under consideration in the biblical account, the bottleneck was most extreme about 8,300 years ago, after which the male population began to recover. [10]
Figure 1. Adapted from Fig. 2 of [10]. There was a severe bottleneck among the effective male population (Y-chromosome population) beginning about 10,000 years ago, which is not seen in the effective female population (mitochondrial population).
Thanks to computer modeling, we now know that the most likely cause of this bottleneck is extreme warfare between patrilineal clans (descended from one man). [11] When a patrilineal clan is wiped out by warfare, the unique Y-chromosome signature from their common (male) ancestor is lost, while the mitochondrial DNA diversity is retained by intermarriage of women between clans. This violence and warfare is reflected in the biblical account (and, interestingly, not in other ancient Near Eastern flood myths).
Conclusion
The biblical account of the pre-Flood world (Gen. 4-6) includes the story of Cain and Abel as well as the genealogy of Noah. Although they contain no specific details that can be corroborated by science, nor do they contradict the scientific data. The narrative of Cain’s curse strongly suggests the existence of other people outside the garden of Eden, supporting the findings of science that Homo sapiens has existed since at least 300,000 years ago. The record of extreme violence and wickedness is supported by evidence of a Y-chromosome bottleneck in the Near East around 6,300 BC. Thus, as we saw earlier with the description of the garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, the biblical account of the pre-Flood world and the findings of modern science corroborate each other.
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[1] Jeffrey I. Rose, “New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 849-883.
[2] Dorian Q. Fuller, “Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World,” Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (2007): 903-924; Juan Deng et al., “Paternal Origins and Migratory Episodes of Domestic Sheep,” Current Biology 30 (2020): 4085-4095.
[3] Interestingly, there existed several settlements along the eastern Persian Gulf dating to around this time period (~10,000 BC), which “hints at a population around the eastern Gulf basin and associated tributaries distinct from its northern Zarzian neighbors carrying out some form of intensive plant processing” [1, p. 863]. Note however that “land of Nod” literally means “land of wandering” and may not refer to a specific place.
[4] Note that the Bible never claims Adam and Eve were the first or only humans that existed at the time, contrary to popular belief. All it claims is that Eve was the (genealogical) “mother of all living” at the time Genesis 3:20 was written, without precluding the existence of other ancestors. Paul refers to Adam as the “first man,” but in the same passage refers to Jesus as the “second man,” indicating that he is speaking of the first and second archetypal “man,” not the literal first and second humans (Jesus wasn’t the second human to exist!). For further discussion see Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).
[5] Daniel Richter et al., “The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age,” Nature 546 (2017): 293-296.
[6] For example, see Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Jean Noel Bacro, “Brief communication: Estimates of some demographic parameters in a neolithic rock chamber (approximately 2000 BC) using iterative techniques for aging and demographic estimators,” American Journal of Biological Anthropology 102, no. 4 (1997): 569-575.
[7] Carol A. Hill, “Making Sense of the Numbers in Genesis,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 55, no. 4 (2003): 243-245.
[8] R. K. Harrison, “Reinvestigating the Antediluvian Sumerian King List,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Seminary 36, no. 1 (1993): 4; consider the epitaph of Imhotep, a scribe during the 3rd Dynasty of Egypt.
[9] John Millam, “The Genesis Genealogies,” Reasons to Believe, June 2010, https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/the-genesis-genealogies.
[10] Monika Karmin et al., “A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,” Genome Research 25, no. 4 (2015): 459-466; see Supplemental Table S4 for the date of the most extreme bottleneck in the Near East (8.3 kya).
[11] Tian Chen Zeng et al., “Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,” Nature Communications 9 (2018): 2077.
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