Table of Contents
At school I learned a simple story. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, an ape that lived millions of years ago. One branch stayed in the forest and became the chimpanzee. The other branch walked out, grew a bigger brain and became us.
I believed it for years. I still think much of the evidence behind it is real. But the more I read, the more the word “naturally” bothers me.
The mainstream view, fairly
Here is the school story with its numbers.
Geneticists date the split between the human line and the chimpanzee line to roughly 6 to 7 million years ago. The oldest fossil put near that split is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a skull found in Chad. Michel Brunet and his team described it in Nature in 2002. The animals found with it suggest it is between 6 and 7 million years old.
In 2005 the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium published the chimp genome in Nature. A genome is the full set of DNA in a cell. They found that single DNA letters differ at a rate of 1.23% between human and chimp copies. About 1.06% or less of that is a fixed difference between the two species. The rest is variation within each species. That 1.23% is where the popular “98.8% the same” comes from.
That number has a catch. When you also count stretches of DNA that one species has and the other lacks, the match drops. Roy Britten put it at about 95% in a 2002 paper in PNAS. In his sample, 1.4% came from single letters and another 3.4% from inserted or deleted stretches.
Then there is chromosome 2. Chimps, gorillas and orangutans have 24 pairs of chromosomes. We have 23. In 1991 Jacques IJdo and colleagues reported in PNAS that human chromosome 2 carries two sets of chromosome-tip sequences, called telomeres, joined head to head. They read this as the trace of two ancestral chromosomes fused end to end. Those two match separate chromosomes in the great apes.
For mainstream science, this fusion is strong proof of common descent. I agree it shows that our bodies share a template with the apes.
My questions
Common descent and natural descent are not the same claim. The data show that we share a template. They do not show who or what changed it.
The fusion of chromosome 2 happened once, in our line only, and it spread to every human alive. Mainstream science explains this by chance and a small population. I ask whether it could also have been done on purpose.
Chimps stayed chimps for millions of years. We changed fast. Our brain roughly tripled in size. We got language, art, cities and writing. To me the pace looks more like an intervention than a slow drift.
I also notice what is missing in the school story. Almost every ancient culture says the opposite. Their gods made humans, often from clay, and often to work.
The enclosed garden
This is where my research on this site comes in. In my reading of Genesis, Adam was not the first human on Earth. He was a made man, kept in a protected place.
Genesis 2:8 in the King James Version says it plainly.
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Genesis 2:8 (KJV)
The man was formed elsewhere and then put in the garden. On my page on The Adam race I note that “enclosed garden” fits the Hebrew better than “Paradise”. A walled garden is a place you keep things in, and keep things out of.
The name of the maker matters too. The Hebrew text uses YHWH and Elohim. The Italian Bible translator Mauro Biglino reads Elohim as a plural group of powerful beings, not one God. More on Mauro Biglino.
Bashar, a source channeled by Darryl Anka, calls the garden a laboratory.
There were many different labs around your planet, but the primary one was in the Middle East.
Bashar, The Hidden Truth of Adam, Eve, and Lilith
In Bashar’s account the Anunnaki, gods of the Sumerian texts, mixed their genes with Homo erectus to make Homo sapiens. He dates it to between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. I summarise this on The Adam race.
The Mesopotamian flood epic Atrahasis gives the motive. The gods are tired of digging canals. The womb goddess Belet-ili is asked to make a worker. On my Genesis 3 page I quote the line that man should “bear the load of the gods”.
Paul Wallis, an Australian author and former church minister, goes one step further on the same page.
Or you go to Genesis 3—Yahweh in Genesis 3 is not necessarily a dragon; it’s just the later name that’s been put into that text. The real name of that entity is Enlil.
Paul Wallis, A populated universe
Michael Tsarion argues the same frame in Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation (2002). More on Michael Tsarion.
Who was outside the garden?
If Adam was made and kept in a garden, there were people outside it. Genesis itself hints at them.
Cain kills Abel and is sent away. His fear is not of wild animals.
Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.
Genesis 4:14 (KJV)
Who would find him? Adam’s family was three people at that point. Cain then gets a mark to protect him, a wife and a city in the land of Nod.
People who lived before or beside Adam are called pre-Adamites. I collect the authors who argued for them on The pre-Adamites.
Billy Carson, an American author on ancient history, says it bluntly.
Millions of people were on this planet long before Adam even arrived, so forget that Adam was first and Eve was first.
Billy Carson, Billy Carson on Enlil and Enki, at 6:17
So I end up with two kinds of human. One kind came through the long natural line from the apes. The other kind, Adam’s line, was made from that stock in a garden. The Bible then tracks that second line, and on The gerim I show how its laws keep it apart from outsiders.
Where the two stories meet
I do not throw away the school story. The shared template, the 6 to 7 million years and the fused chromosome can all be true.
What I question is one word. “Naturally” assumes nobody stepped in. The ancient texts say somebody did.
The same texts and channelings say the experiments did not stop with Adam. Some, they say, mixed humans and animals. I collect those accounts on Genetic hybridization: half human half animal.
Just for the fun of it
The school story has a mirror image. If you tell it the other way round, it sounds like this.
Sources
- Brunet, M. et al. (2002). A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa. Nature 418, 145 to 151. doi:10.1038/nature00879
- Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005). Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. Nature 437, 69 to 87. doi:10.1038/nature04072
- Britten, R. J. (2002). Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels. PNAS 99, 13633 to 13635. doi:10.1073/pnas.172510699
- IJdo, J. W. et al. (1991). Origin of human chromosome 2: an ancestral telomere-telomere fusion. PNAS 88, 9051 to 9055. doi:10.1073/pnas.88.20.9051
- Genesis 2:8 and 4:14, King James Version.
Related pages
- The Adam race: the enclosed garden and the Anunnaki labs.
- The pre-Adamites: the people outside the garden.
- Genesis 3: Atrahasis and the made worker.
- The gerim: how the bloodline was kept apart.
- Genetic hybridization: half human half animal: experiments that went further.
