Whenever I read the first two chapters of Genesis in the Bible, with its story of the creation of the first two human beings, I can’t help but think of the typical and persistent stereotypes of our first ancestors.  You know the kind of cartoon images I’m talking about: Adam, with a huge club over his shoulder, dragging Eve along by the hair, grunting out primitive sounds that hardly pass for language as he makes his way back to his cave.

Why do people persist with that sort of caricature of our earliest ancestors?  If God made us good, if He created us in His own image and likeness, then our first parents were undoubtedly far more intelligent and skilled than the so-called ‘experts’ are willing to admit.

That came home to me on one occasion when the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the discovery of parts of a skeleton that been found in southern France.  The article began with the words: “Early humans, usually dismissed as grunting and backward, may have had advanced technical skills and the will to care for vulnerable community members...!”  You can almost sense the writer’s surprise and his grudging admission that the experts may previously have gotten it all wrong.

What triggered this admission was evidence that the jaw of these skeletal remains had obviously been toothless for a long time prior to death.  The scientists admitted that in a ‘primitive caveman’ scenario this person would quickly have starved to death if the only diet was tough meat and if no one had provided adequate care.

There were a number of factors that helped demolish the caveman caricature.  First, it was admitted that those around this individual were obviously not living on the edge of survival – they had more than enough food for their own needs and therefore could also readily share with others.  Second, it was suggested these people had the tools and the ability to use them to cut the man’s food into tiny pieces and feed him in order to keep him alive.  Third, it was reluctantly admitted that previously the experts had not thought that primitive people from this period had the socio-cultural structures to care for one another.  Fourth, animal bones and charcoal remains in the dirt floor of the cave indicated that these people had the ability to hunt, to make fire and to cook meat so as to tenderise it for their toothless companion.

I won’t bore you with some of the other so-called “scientific data” from the story – that this person was considered as belonging to the Pre-Neanderthals and that the jawbone was judged to be “up to 175,000 years old”.

The point I want to make is that so often the preconceived ideas of so many scientists have been determined by the theory of evolution.  We often forget that evolution is, after all, a theory.  Today in schools and universities it is more often taken as a fact that we humans evolved from the more primitive forms of life.  That means that it was only over countless thousands of years that we eventually learnt some of our most basic skills, including the skills of socialisation and caring for one another.

The Bible book of Genesis allows us to paint quite a different picture – not one of evolutionary progress but one of regression (or devolution) after we humans fell into sin.  We started off as image-bearers of God with many skills – Adam was not a “hunter-gatherer” but an agriculturalist in charge of God’s Garden of Eden.  We were created as highly socialised people made for relationships.  Over and over again it was human sinful behaviour that led to the kind of downward plunge that saw the righteous Lot become a caveman in Genesis 19.

I always find it interesting when the latest scientific discoveries undermine the theory of evolution and support the Bible.

John Westendorp