How does a person fit prehistoric man into Christianity?
Where there any references anywhere made for Neathandrals and Cro-Magnon humans?
Adam and Eve were made after the humans referred to in Gen 1. My opinion is that the humans in Gen 1 are the "cave men" you speak of. Adam and Eve were not the first 2 humans to spring forth all of humanity as some would have you believe. They were special and had a specific task, but it was not to start the human race. As the human race had already been established XX,XXX of years before Adam and Eve were even created.
I don’t think so.
If you were to add up the years mentioned in the Old Testament (this is based on translations of the Masoretic Text (eg KJV, NRSV, NASB, NJPS, etc), not the Septuagint or the Samaritan Torah), then it would the date of Adam’s creation at about 6000 years ago, hence 4000 BCE.
But according to archaeology in the Middle East, the cultures and industries in this region, would date be the Late Neolithic period.
The Neolithic period started around about 12,000 years ago, hence approximately 10,000 BCE, which coincide with the end of last glacial period. The warmer climate allow for people to settle down more, constructing huts or something more permanent, thereby starting agricultural industries, starting learning how to farm and animal husbandry, and several thousand years later, to make ceramic (pottery) that help store food.
By 5000 BCE, Neolithic towns and cities began appearing more frequently.
Jericho for example is the site of successive settlements being built on top of each other, and the oldest settlement date as early as 9000 BCE. By around 8400 BCE, this settlement grew large enough to have 70 homes, where the inhabitants build stone wall around this town, at least 3 metres high.
Jericho is evidence that people in this area, weren’t living in caves.
The Neolithic settlement in the Barada basin is about as old as Jericho. But unlike Jericho, Damascus didn’t become a prominent city, until late 2nd millennium, Late Bronze Age.
In pre-Sumerian Mesopotamia, the city, which the Genesis 10, called Erech, but better known as Uruk, the first settlement there was about 5000 BCE.
Like Jericho, Uruk have newer settlement being built on top of older settlements. But throughout the 4th millennium BCE, from 4000 to 3040 BCE, it was the largest and richest Neolithic city, not on in pre-Sumerian Mesopotamia, but in the world.
Temples were built for Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar) and An (Anu) in Uruk around 3500 BCE, gods that continued to be worshipped later by the Bronze Age Sumerians of the 3rd millennium BCE. Around the same time, when these temples were being built, older form of cuneiforms were discovered on site, that predated Sumerian cuneiforms; it is believed that the older cuneiforms evolved into earliest Sumerian writing, around 3000 BCE.
The fact this city exist before the mythological Flood, which make Genesis 10 wrong, about Uruk being built by a grandson of Ham, Nimrod, after the Flood.
My points in all this, for some of the Neolithic people, these settlements mean, they have given up the nomadic lifestyle of hunters and gatherers, therefore taking up growing crops and livestock.
Of course, nomads and hunters still exist among some people, and even persisted to the Iron Age, but you cannot called Neolithic people “cavemen”.
But anyway, Adam and Eve, as the first humans, don’t exist, except in myths, especially when you considered that the modern humans (Homo sapiens), which would include the Cro-Magnon people, predated the Neolithic people, as early as 200,000 years ago (Middle Palaeolithic period).
