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And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
—Gen. 4:16-17 (KJV)
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Aye, there's the rub! What about this land of Nod? Who are the Noddites—or should they be called Noddians? And what about Mrs. Cain? Where did she come from? And who was it living in the city named after Enoch? We have just had Adam and Eve, kicked out of Eden, with two sons, Cain and Abel—more to come shortly, it is true, but hardly populating the earth. And certainly not supplying wives to the sons—if they did, would this not be incest? It was questions like this that kick-started discussions of Adam and the possibility that he was not the only man around at the beginning—that indeed he might not have been the man at all around at the beginning and that there might have been pre-adamites—Adam's Ancestors, as historian David Livingstone calls his fascinating and important new book on the topic.
The mark of the true scholar, the really inventive one, is that he or she shows us that there are problems and issues worth discussing that we simply did not know about or even speculate about. I confess that in over thirty years of researching and writing about evolution and science and religion and that sort of thing, I just had not thought about Adam and Eve and the problem of early humans—as were increasingly revealed in the fossil record, as are pressed upon us as we survey the different races of humans around us today, and above all as we try to fit this with the sacred text. Livingstone shows how much I was missing and goes a long way, in what will surely be the definitive treatment, to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
Basically his story runs from about the time of the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century down to the present, with the real climax coming at the end of the 19th century and aftershocks in the years subsequent. The story starts with the prominence that is given to the Bible by the Reformation and the spread of this work in accessible forms, combined with such challenging phenomena as the fairly recently discovered peoples of the Americas. Were they descendents of Adam or did they have another origin? Bound up with this of course were issues like original sin—surely the savages were fallen and in need of God's grace, but if so then did they have their own Eden or were they at one with us? Did they slip across via Greenland?
These sorts of issues were taken up by the most important figure in the whole story, Isaac La Peyrère, a French Calvinist of Portuguese Jewish origins, who was captured by the Catholics and taken to Rome, where he repented of his heresies and was received into the True Church, after having had friendly chats with the pope. His Prae-Adamitae (Men before Adam) was the scandal of the age—banned by Cardinal Richelieu, to whom it was dedicated, but nesting in the library of that other difficult Jew of Portuguese origins, Baruch Spinoza, it naturally sold like hot cakes. Arguing that Adam was not the first man, the work was a curious mishmash of biblical exegesis and empirical speculation about races and biology (as we would now call it) and geography. (As much a geographer as a historian, Livingstone is good on this.) Prae-Adamitae was one of those works—Robert Chambers' evolutionary tract Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published fifteen years before Darwin's Origin of Species, comes to mind as another example—which seem to have been important not just for what they said but for how they stimulated people to think, including those in opposition. After La Peyrère, it was no longer quite that daring to suggest that the sacred text is always literally true or that the earth is quite as young as the genealogies suggest, or that Adam was unique. And if Adam was not first or unique, then are all humans nevertheless still descended from one group (monogenism) or (as La Peyrère rather thought) are we from different groups (polygenism)?
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