CREATION NARRATIVES

For thousands of years, humans have constructed narratives of how the world, and humans, came to be. These creation narratives have varied over time and across cultures, depending on a society’s values and the evidence available. To understand the origins of modern humans, we must come to terms with scales of time: the billions, millions, and hundreds of thousands of years through which the universe, earth, and life on it developed into what they are today. Though the hominin ancestors of modern humans lived millions of years ago, our tools for telling the modern creation narrative are relatively new.

Only 350 years ago, English clerics claimed on the basis of biblical calculations and Christian tradition that the first day of creation was Sunday, October 23, 4004 BCE. One scholar even specified that creation happened at 9:00 A.M. on the morning of that day. These seventeenth-century clerics were not the first to engage critically with the biblical story of creation. Rabbi Yose ben Halafta, a second-century CE rabbinic sage some 1,500 years earlier, used Genesis to calculate his own date for the beginning of creation (October 7, 3761 BCE). And the first-century CE writer Philo, an Alexandrian Jew who opined that “no one, whether poet or historian, could ever give expression in an adequate manner to the beauty of [Moses’s] ideas respecting the creation of the world,” wrote an extended philosophical treatise that set out to do just that.

Modern science, however, indicates that the origin of the universe dates back 13.8 billion years and that hominins began to separate from apes some 7 million years ago. These new discoveries have proved as mind-boggling to Hindus and Muslims as to Christians and Jews—all of whom believed, in different ways, that the universe was not so old and that divine beings had a role in creating it and all life, including the first humans. For millennia, human communities across the globe have constructed narratives that extend back differing lengths of time and suggest various roles for humans and gods in the process of universal creation. For instance, the Judeo-Christian narrative debated by English clerics and turn-of-the-first-millennium Jewish scholars portrays a single God creating a universe out of nothingness, populating it with plants, animals, and humans, in a span of six days. The centuries-old creation story of the Yoruba peoples of West Africa depicts a divine being descending from the heavens in human form and becoming the godlike king Oduduwa, who established the Yoruba kingdom and the rules by which his subjects were to live. The foundational texts of Hinduism, which date to the seventh or sixth century BCE, account that the world is millions, not billions, of years old. Chinese Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) astronomers believed that at the world’s beginning the planets were conjoined and that they would merge again at the end of time. The Buddhists’ cosmos comprised millions of worlds, each consisting of a mountain encircled by four continents, its seas surrounded by a wall of iron.

Yet even the million-year time frames and multiple planetary systems that ancient Asian thinkers endorsed did not prepare their communities for the idea that humans are related to apes. In all traditional cosmologies, humans came into existence fully formed, at a single moment, as did the other beings that populated the world. Modern discoveries about humanity’s origins have challenged these traditions, because no tradition conceived that creatures evolved into new kinds of life; that apes, humans, and other hominins branched from one another in a long evolutionary process; and that all of humanity originated in Africa.