I'll have a crack at this Mr Fox....
The Bible account in Genesis states that there was a long period of preparation before sentient life was created. That doesn't mean that life did not exist before the 6th "day" (or creative period....we believe that each "day" could have been millions of years long).
We begin with a formless and waste planet, completely covered in water and thick cloud layers. The first thing that penetrated the clouds was light. Perhaps God did this by initially thinning the cloud layers...he doesn't say how he accomplished these things...only recording the results.
Then a division between the water on the earth and the water above the earth was made creating an atmosphere.
Next to appear was dry land, which came up out of the sea. The buckling of Earth's crust may have created the dry land as we know that in the oceans very deep trenches, kilometers deep exist. With the dry land came the first life mentioned...grass and vegetation and every kind of fruit tree all bearing seed for the next generation. These are biologically living things but are inanimate and have no intelligence. They were created first because when living creatures that required them for food were made, there was specific food and water for them to drink. They also supplied abundant oxygen for other living things to breathe. The atmosphere contained the right mixture of gases to sustain many forms of life.
I see in the Genesis account no need for evolution to have ever taken place. Intelligent design makes it redundant....and answers all the questions that evolution raises but cannot answer....like where, when and how did life originate?
If you assume that evolution must have taken place, then your questions reflect that assumption. Direct creation by a power that humans cannot examine or comprehend, makes the process completely unnecessary. Fine tuning is seen everywhere in the Universe. Fine tuning is the mark of a perfectionist IMO.
Again, if you assume that evolution is the only explanation for life in its many forms on this Earth, then your questions will reflect that assumption.
The fossil record tells scientists nothing more than they are will to extract from it. Those fossils have no voice except the ones science gave them. The only hoax that I can see is the scientists putting words in long dead, bony mouths to support their untestable ideas.
There is only one Creator God who is real....YHWH....all the others are fakes created by the pretender who first challenged God's right to set reasonable limits for his human creation....the only ones he gifted with free will. When humans thought that they should decide for themselves what is good and bad...the Creator gave them free reign and allowed them to see for themselves where their own decisions would take them...and here we are.
Following the wrong god, or the wrong religion, or even if you ditch them both.....nothing will alter the outcome. The Bible indicates that we will all answer to the same Judge. So its good to consider the whole story, not just bits of it that don't make much sense the way it is told by unbelievers.
We all have access to the same information so that puts us all on one level.....we decide "what" and "who" to believe for our own reasons. That is how I see it...
As I've noted elsewhere in some other discussions about Christianity, Jesus's family tree has a time span of 77 generations listed between his generation and Adam whom the Bible claims was the "first man". Reference: (
Luke 3:23-38) and Eve whom the Bible claims as the mother of all the living. (
Genesis 3:20)
However, the Australian aborigines have evidently been in Australia for over a thousand consecutive generations. Reference:
Aboriginal Australians - Wikipedia
There have been hundreds of generations of Native Americans between the time their common ancestry migrated from Asia until the time of Christ.
Reference:
Native Americans in the United States - Wikipedia
Of course, the Bible is wrong; in fact, there were people prior to the 76th generation before Christ that allegedly was spawned by Adam and Eve.
Adam as being the first man and perpetrator of original sin is an important premise of Christianity. If Adam wasn't the first man, then there isn't actually any "origin sin". Jesus supposedly died on the Cross to save humankind from "original sin". If there isn't any "original sin" from which to be saved, then Jesus Christ's death on the Cross is pretty pointless and meaningless. Evidently, there were many generations of people prior to the 76th generation before Christ whom the Bible claims was spawned by Adam. So then, Adam, Eve and original sin are mythological. There is neither any "first man" nor "original sin" throughout human evolution. Thus, Jesus Christ having died on the cross to save mankind from "original sin" is not reality but is rather mythological.
The fossil record isn't the only evidence in support of evolution. There is other collaborating evidence, such as overwhelming genetic evidence of common ancestry between humans and other great ape species.
Specific examples from comparative physiology and biochemistry:
Chromosome 2 in humans
Main article: Chromosome 2 (human)
Further information: Chimpanzee Genome Project § Genes of the Chromosome 2 fusion site
Figure 1b: Fusion of ancestral chromosomes left distinctive remnants of telomeres, and a vestigial centromere
Evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens from a common ancestor with chimpanzees is found in the number of chromosomes in humans as compared to all other members of Hominidae. All hominidae have 24 pairs of chromosomes, except humans, who have only 23 pairs. Human chromosome 2 is a result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes.
The evidence for this includes:
The correspondence of chromosome 2 to two ape chromosomes. The closest human relative, the common chimpanzee, has near-identical DNA sequences to human chromosome 2, but they are found in two separate chromosomes. The same is true of the more distant gorilla and orangutan.
The presence of a vestigial centromere. Normally a chromosome has just one centromere, but in chromosome 2 there are remnants of a second centromere.
The presence of vestigial telomeres. These are normally found only at the ends of a chromosome, but in chromosome 2 there are additional telomere sequences in the middle.
Chromosome 2 thus presents strong evidence in favour of the common descent of humans and other apes. According to J. W. Ijdo, "We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2
Figure 1b: Fusion of ancestral chromosomes left distinctive remnants of telomeres, and a vestigial centromere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_o...on_descent
Endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs) are remnant sequences in the genome left from ancient viral infections in an organism. The retroviruses (or virogenes) are always passed on to the next generation of that organism that received the infection. This leaves the virogene left in the genome. Because this event is rare and random, finding identical chromosomal positions of a virogene in two different species suggests common ancestry. Cats (Felidae) present a notable instance of virogene sequences demonstrating common descent. The standard phylogenetic tree for Felidae have smaller cats (Felis chaus, Felis silvestris, Felis nigripes, and Felis catus) diverging from larger cats such as the subfamily Pantherinae and other carnivores. The fact that small cats have an ERV where the larger cats do not suggests that the gene was inserted into the ancestor of the small cats after the larger cats had diverged. Another example of this is with humans and chimps. Humans contain numerous ERVs that comprise a considerable percentage of the genome. Sources vary, but 1% to 8% has been proposed. Humans and chimps share seven different occurrences of virogenes, while all primates share similar retroviruses congruent with phylogeny.
The first individual of the genus Homo-species formed from a couple of Australopithecus hetero zygotes, each of whom had the same type of chromosome rearrangements formed by fusion of the whole long arms of two acrocentric chromosomes, mated together and reproduced viable and fertile offspring with 46 chromosomes.
This first generation of Homo habilis then incestuously bred with each other and reproduced the next subsequent generation of Homo habilis.
References:
- J. Tjio and A. Levan. 1956. The chromosome number of Man. Hereditas, 42( 1-2): 1-6.
- W. Ijdo et al.1991. Origin of human chromosome 2: an ancestral telomere-telomere fusión. PNAS, 88: 9051-9056.
- Meyer et al. 2012 A high-coverage genome sequence from an archaic Denisovan individual. Science, 338:222-226.; K. H. Miga. 2016. Chromosome-specific Centromere sequences provide an estímate of the Ancestral Chromosome 2 Fusion event in Hominin Genome.Journ. of Heredity. 1-8. Doi:10.1093/jhered/esw039.
There's plenty of evidence humans share common ancestry with other great apes.
Evidence of common descent - Wikipedia
ERVs provide the closest thing to a mathematical proof for evolution.. ERVs are the relics of ancient viral infections preserved in our DNA. The odd thing is many ERVs are located in exactly the same position on our genome and the chimpanzee genome! There are two explanations for the perfectly matched ERV locations. Either it is an unbelievable coincidence that viruses just by chance were inserted in exactly the same location in our genomes, or humans and chimps share a common ancestor. The chances that a virus was inserted at the exact same location is 1 in 3,000,000,000. Humans and chimps share 7 instances of viruses inserted at perfectly matched location. It was our common ancestor that was infected, and we both inherited the ERVs.
Johnson, Welkin E.; Coffin, John M. (1999-08-31).
"Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences".
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 96(18): 10254–10260.
Bibcode:
1999PNAS...9610254J.
doi:
10.1073/pnas.96.18.10254.
ISSN 0027-8424.
PMC 17875.
PMID 10468595.