You are welcome!
My thoughts on your questions are below, but for all of these, Genesis is not explicit, so I don't think we can know with much certainty how exactly the soul played out back then. And because souls don't fossilize well, God may be the only one who knows for sure. That's OK, it's not a salvation issue anyway.
Aquaman wrote:
Referring to your post about Adam, are you saying that God granted Him a soul? Do you believe Eve was also granted a soul as well?
Yes, that would be my guess. I would guess that God gave Adam and Eve the first souls at the point that his creation reached humankind. Exactly what point that was, is of course speculation. Was that at the point of the
Australopithicenes, about 2,000,000 years ago?
Homo erectus, 1,000,000 years ago? Early
Homo sapiens, 200,000 years ago? Later
Homo sapiens 80,000 years ago? God knows.
What about the group that they lived in, did they not have souls or understanding of God?
That would be my guess - that their co-members did not have souls nor an understanding of God. Conversely, maybe God gave the whole group souls all at once? I tend to think not, becuase for one thing, that would mean giving a soul to an adult, and two, because I think Genesis fits better with a single Adam.
If so, wouldn't that imply that there were and still could be human civilizations that are soulless because they did not descend from Adam and Eve?
While there could be, I think the odds of that are extremely low. People interbreed, and move around, so if Adam was even as recent a few thousand years, his descendants would include everyone. The only exception to that is migrations to isolated places, like North America or Rapa Nui - and even those are too recent to be relevant. People forget that your family tree, my family tree, is not a line, but a huge (geometrically increasing) tree. We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 gg grandparents, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, etc. And that's only in going back a measly 300 years or so. Imagine doing that, doubling every 25 years, to go back several thousand years!
For instance:
Pharaoh Khufu is a single, historical, real person. Pharoah Khufu had many kids, back then in 2560 BC. Now, notice that when those kids have kids, all the grandkids are also descendants of Khufu, as are all the great grandkids, and so on. So even if the population is staying constant, the number of descendants of Khufu approximately doubles every generation (around 25 years). So by ~2360 BC, there were hundreds of Khufu descendants. By 2160, most of the population of the capital city were descendants of Khufu, and descendants of Khufu had begun to increase in numbers in other cities. By ~1500 BC, even conservative estimates would put most of the population of Egypt as descendants of Khufu, as well as numbers now in what is today Israel, Greece, Italy and so on. By 500 BC, the descendants of Khufu include nearly everyone around the Mediterranean, and by 500 AD, that includes much of Europe too.
By 1500 AD, practically all of Europe are Khufu descendants, and so you, myself and most of this on this board are Khufu descendants, and he only lived a few thousand years ago! So Adam, living well before 30,000 years ago, and perhaps as far back as 300,000 years ago or more, would of course be the direct ancestor of everyone alive today, especially if he lived in a humanoid population of transitional apes.
Papias
