Consequences of Adam and Eve living in the same era

Couples with age gaps are not considered outré any more, but when it spans a few millennia, eyebrows will be raised.

So, the dismay at the revelation by genetic scientists that far from cavorting together — in an African savannah if not the Garden of Eden — “Y-chromosome” Adam postdated “mitochondrial” Eve by at least 50,000 years, could be understood.

But now it seems Adam was older than previously believed and sowed his wild oats roughly around the same time as his primeval female counterpart, rather than being a toyboy.

Sadly, whether they actually did “know each other”, Biblically speaking, remains a matter of conjecture, though we all can trace our ancestry back to both of them individually.

As our most recent common ancestors ( MRCA) definitely procreated to produce plenty of offspring in order to become the progenitors of today’s billions, we can surmise that they must have been rather catholic when it came to partners. It is unfortunate that their multifarious “significant others” have become genetically insignificant in the modern humans’ DNA with the passing of so many millennia.

Hopefully, as scientific techniques improve, other distinct chromosomal and mitochondrial forebears will be identified and we will get a clearer picture of what our freewheeling ancestors were really up to.