Which in turn reminded of the question – Who did Cain & Abel marry?
This was one of those I tried Googling while I was still just learning – I was surprised to find that nothing much turned up. It is just one indicator of how the web has grown that today my query produced 399,000 results.
It is not that I want to ‘know’ the answer, but how it is dealt with. After all if The Bible is supposed to be an infallible handbook of sexual morality for all time, must there not be an implication that brother/sister incest is condoned – or even mother/son? Or did god create at least one other couple to get round these problems?
It is fascinating how some of the attempted answers rely on the supposedly extreme length of life lived by these earliest members of the human race. Marrying a sister who is a couple of centuries younger than you is absolutely not the same as …
But the questions around the first man, or the first member of any new species, are not just problems for moralists or theologians. Scientists too talk about the first humans in the plural, leaving the details a bit vague. Is there an intermediate stage where there are the equivalent of ‘mixed race’ beings? Must all the first members of a new species come from the same two parents or is there the equivalent of a line of near relatives evolving together like waves rippling to the shore? Is there a minimum number of members for a species to be a species?
I think we should be told.
But the questions around the first man, or the first member of any new species, are not just problems for moralists or theologians. Scientists too talk about the first humans in the plural, leaving the details a bit vague. Is there an intermediate stage where there are the equivalent of ‘mixed race’ beings? Must all the first members of a new species come from the same two parents or is there the equivalent of a line of near relatives evolving together like waves rippling to the shore? Is there a minimum number of members for a species to be a species?
I think we should be told.
