How Long have Humans Lived on Earth?

Personally I feel that God created man a few hundred thousand years ago.

I believe that the fruit of the tree of Life gave man long life, if not a form of immortality. Now the church will say or has said man never ate the fruit of the tree of Life. That is not scriptural the Bible never says that man did or didn't eat.

The first commandment that God gave man was not to eat from the tree of knowledge but he could eat of every other tree and the tree of knowledge was centered in the garden. So why would man and his offspring not eat from the tree of life?

I believe Adam and Eve had many, many children before their sin. And the Bible names only the children born after the seduction and sin of Adam and Eve. Though the Bible does not mention children born before Cain and Abel. And if you look at the Bible you find the Bible is basically life after sin.

The Bible does speak about the people who were around, who were told not to kill Cain. Where did those people come from? Since the Bible does not mention and the church teaches that Adam and Eve only had two sons before Cain slew Abel. Where did they come from? What are the assumptions of the church?

Nothing is said of Adam and Eve having daughters, only the two sons, but the church will assume that they did because it agrees with their theology, yet toss out / deny other assumptions. Daughters were not mentioned until Genesis 6.

Who named the Land of Nod? Why is it called The Land of Nod? In those days, lands / tribes / cities were named after their founders. Why does the bible tell us Cain knew his wife after he went to Land of Nod. Is that saying Cain did not know his wife while he was in Eden, or they did not have children while they were in Eden? Or is it telling us Cain found a wife in the Land of Nod? What is taught is Assumptions again, views passed down through the centuries.

The history of man; scientifically, shows man has been here quite a while. So in order to continue to support 6,000 year old Earth as fact, the church has to reject it.

Were the translators correct with their usage (of the definition) of the Hebrew word yom / Yome? The word has several different meanings can be used quite a few different ways, not necessarily a literal 24 hour span, but can be used to said a period in time, a span of time, a space and time. godrules.net/library/strongs2a/heb3117.htm https://share.google/eAkAAbe8rNoDC8upu

Now here's a kicker :::: God did not create the literal 24-hour day until he put the sun and moon in place - Genesis 1:14. Now shouldn't that be telling us the days spoken of before Genesis 1:14 is not speaking of a literal 24-hour day but is speaking more like a day to the Lord is as a thousand years and A thousand years is as a day. Before God put the sun and moon in place there was no time table to use as a literal 24-hour day point, considering the Sun and Moon is to measure seasons, days, years.

There are churches that are beginning to believe the Earth is older than 6000 years. But most churches still adhere to man being here for 6,000 years using genealogies of those written in Scripture. Which maybe fairly close according to those names of descendants written. From what I can see it has been an estimated 6,000 years / a bit more, since the fall of Adam, not his creation.

DialecticSkeptic said:

Not as far back as human societies. If Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago, that would be ~3976 BCE. It would take another several hundred years for written language to appear (c. 3300 BCE), but large human societies already existed. Jericho and Tell Qaramel had been around for ~5,000 years by that point; Nevali Cori had been around for nearly as long; Catalhoyuk was over 3,000 years old by that point. (And this is just Mesopotamia.)

So, yeah, human societies pre-existed written records by thousands of years; even Adam and Eve existed ~700 years before writing. (They entered a world full of human societies, from the ancient Near East to the North American plains.)

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To me there is a problem with this interpretation. Sure if you add the genealogies in your particular version you get 3976 BCE. But there's other versions with 5500 BCE and 3700 BCE. These are not the most sensible dates for Adam and Eve. Similarly Noah's story isn't sensible in 2200 BCE or even 3300 BCE. But both make sense in pre-charcolithic times. The city of Eridu was once at the coast(now 100 miles inland) and it was founded(5500 BCE) about 500 years after the start of the last series of major worldwide coastal flooding. The Persian gulf would be an ideal setting for Noah. Why else would the oldest and most spectacular existing city be founded as a coastal village? They were starting over from nothing.


Similarly Adam's story has an ideal setting of about 12,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE. The middle east greened up and became an oak forest at this time. Then climate change wiped out most of the trees leaving the people to forage and toil grains. Hard to find a depiction of the middle east during its green period. But all the development comes post green period. The people living in plenty never develop anything complex. When their society ends they abandon their settlements and sometime in the 500 year period of rural living develop agriculture and animal husbandry. Then they come back and resettle abandoned locations leaving behind the first traces of agriculture fully developed outside of society. This is why I attribute agriculture to one person or family instead of a culture. Adam was the foundation of civilization itself.

AaronClaricus said:

To me, there is a problem with this interpretation. Sure, if you add the genealogies in your particular version you get 3976 BCE. But there's other versions with 5500 BCE and 3700 BCE.

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I am one of those people who push Adam back in time, though not as far back as you do. Without addressing the great ages of the antediluvians and instead taking them at face value, I situate him around ~5100 BCE.

These are not the most sensible dates for Adam and Eve.

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You neglected to say why.

Both [their story and Noah’s] make sense in pre-Chalcolithic times. … Adam was the foundation of civilization itself.

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In a discussion between us, let’s leave Noah out of this. I want to focus on just Adam. (Or does your argument hinge on Noah?) I want to know why Adam’s story makes sense in pre-Chalcolithic times, keeping in mind that Adam is not presented as the founder of civilization in Genesis. It was Cain who is said to have built a city, and Jubal, Jabal, and Tubal-cain who develop culture, music, and metallurgy—outside Eden, east of it, and under the sign of exile.

Adam's story has an ideal setting of about 12,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE.

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I disagree. That is a possible setting, but implausible and unlikely due primarily to the genealogies. They are not a sliding scale to be freely relocated wherever one finds a convenient paleoclimatic event. Once you detach the genealogical route starting with Adam from its historical anchor in Abraham, David, and Jesus, you are no longer doing biblical chronology at all; you are doing archaeological harmonization and retrofitting Scripture to it. If Adam is pushed to 14,000 years ago, the genealogies cease to be genealogies in any meaningful sense. They become symbolic placeholders with no temporal density. At that point, appealing to them at all is disingenuous.

There is no hint in Scripture of Adam being situated in the Epipaleolithic. The textual clues in early Genesis—domesticated animals, agriculture, metalwork, human societies, etc.—seem to put an outside limit of 10,000 years on where Adam and Eve are situated historically.

The Middle East greened up and became an oak forest at this time [12 to 14 thousand years ago]. Then climate change wiped out most of the trees, leaving the people to forage and toil for grains. It is hard to find a depiction of the Middle East during its green period. But all the development comes post-green period. The people living in plenty never develop anything complex. When their society ends, they abandon their settlements and, sometime [during] the 500-year period of rural living, develop agriculture and animal husbandry. Then they [return] and resettle abandoned locations, leaving behind the first traces of agriculture fully developed outside of society.

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When you say that “people living in plenty never develop anything complex,” you are simply begging the question against the historical record conveyed in my post—for things like Jericho and Çatalhöyük are fairly complex, and they developed after the Younger Dryas (which represented a shift in vegetation patterns, not an ecological collapse).