The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  There are more species in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the Bible. But whoever created the story thousands of years ago understood, as modern science has understood, that you can only firmly grasp the whole of a species through a single representative of it. The human of the first chapter of Genesis is in effect the holotype of humanity. God authored this creature and carefully introduced him—naked, of course—on earth as the type specimen. When you contemplate Adam, you contemplate both a particular, individual figure and the entirety of humankind.

  In Adam, the Bible story affirmed, you encounter not only the representative but also the very earliest instance of the species, the progenitor of all those who followed. Here too modern scientific collections have their equivalent, in this case not holotypes but rather fossils of those who are said to be our progenitors. The most famous of these is the creature known as “Lucy,” an individual Australopithecus afarensis female who lived about 3.2 million years ago whose bones—several hundred pieces of them—were found by the American anthropologist Donald Johanson in Ethiopia in 1974. Johanson and his team jokingly nicknamed the skeleton after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which they happened to be playing over and over again on a tape recorder in their remote camp.

  The magic of a particular name has given this immensely distant and indirect ancestor—now preserved at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa—her special appeal. She was three feet seven inches tall, with a small brain like a chimpanzee, far distant from the modern humans who only emerged in Africa more than 3 million years after her species roamed the earth. But, crucially, she did not swing from the trees. Instead, she walked on two feet. No one claims that Lucy was the direct ancestor of all humanity, but there is very strong evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, bears a significant relation to Lucy. Hominins, the taxonomic tribe that includes modern humans and our closest extinct relatives, evolved from such bipedal primate mammals.

  The implications of this evolutionary process are enormous, and they have been hotly contested. It had once seemed possible to tell a straightforward story: We homo sapiens are at the end of a long branch of the great tree of life. Examining our successive extinct ancestors, we could follow that branch back very slowly toward the trunk and trace the stages through which we passed in order to reach our current (and, of course, splendid) state. Now as more and more fossils are discovered—Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo naledi, and so forth—the overarching story becomes steadily less simple. Our ancestry, one evolutionary biologist recently wrote, resembles less a branch than “a bundle of twigs—one might even think it looks like a tangled bush.”

  In a room on the fifth floor of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, David Pilbeam, a renowned paleoanthropologist (that is, someone who studies the kinship lines that connect our species with our near relations) kindly agreed to show me some of these “twigs.” Before I arrived, he had set out bones (or plaster or plastic casts of bones), some in cardboard boxes on the formica-top tables, others assembled into skeletons and posed on little wheeled platforms. Each of the bones represents a leap back into the past, measured in millions of years before the present.

  A replica of Lucy was there, in a cellophane-covered cardboard display box reminiscent of something delivered by a florist for a grand occasion—a funeral, I suppose. There is in truth not much of her to see: fragments of her skull and part of her lower jaw, a few ribs, the sacrum and part of her pelvis, pieces of her legs and arms. On a rolling dolly, a more complete model of an Australopithecus was reconstructed next to her. Nearby was the skeleton of a chimpanzee, and Pilbeam pointed out the subtle differences between its structure and that of Lucy. Subtle indeed: without his expert guidance, I would have missed almost all of them and failed to see that one is an ape and the other is my forebear.

  The oldest fossil in the room was that of the Sahelanthropus from Chad. It looked to me like the skull of a small ape, but, like a detective, Pilbeam observed the telltale signs that it probably stood upright and walked on two feet. If it did so, it mastered this accomplishment very early indeed; the fossil has been dated to around 7 million years before the present, that is, not very far from the time that the Last Common Ancestor split, with one line leading to chimpanzees and the other leading to us.

  As I looked around the room and jumped across millions of years, I experienced something of the queasiness that has led scientists to question metaphors of human evolution as a steady and progressive development along a clearly defined branch. In one corner, apart from the tiniest of hints, our Sahelanthropus forebear seemed to belong to a different universe from our own. In the other, the full skeleton of the Neanderthal stood there, thick of bone like a gorilla, but with a cranium very much the size of ours.

  With ever greater subtlety and ingenuity, paleoanthropologists measure, scrutinize, and interpret the skeletal remains: a pelvis and spine that enable our species to walk upright, shoulder blades that help us fling lethal projectiles, the configuration of the teeth, the increasing size of the brain case. But what had once seemed a triumphal march of progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to find the story line in a tangled bush.

  Evolutionary theory is not threatened by the disappearance of the main highway. On the contrary, from the beginning Darwin insisted on the randomness of mutations, followed by the editing of natural selection, that lead to the emergence of new species. Still, it is disquieting to look around and see a wilderness of discontinuous and crisscrossing tracks. David Pilbeam once published a book called The Ascent of Man. It is not at all clear that he would do so today.

  Nonetheless, most of us, including evolutionary biologists, continue to search for and construct stories of our ascent. For, as the Bible said long ago, we are the dominant species: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Our dominance is clearly linked to our intelligence, our fantastic toolmaking, our complex social and cultural life, and above all our language and symbolic consciousness. But how we developed from ancestors unable to speak, make symbols, or form abstract concepts is not at all understood. There is as yet no fully coherent, satisfying scientific story.

  In the account of the creation of the human on the sixth day—“And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him: male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27)—Genesis offered the equivalent of the bare bones from which scientists derive their images of our earliest forebears. And it provided (as scientists have not been able to do) a definitive starting point. But from the Bible’s words it proved impossible to determine conclusively what the original human would have been like. Not that there lacked many attempts, based on the minutest examination of the text. In the second century CE, Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar concluded from the phrase “male and female He created them” that the original Adam was a hermaphrodite. The third-century rabbi Samuel ben Nahman interpreted the description to mean that “When the Lord created Adam He created him double-faced, then He split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side and one back on the other side.” Another argued that Adam originally filled the whole world, stretching from east to west; another that his height reached from earth to heaven; another that he could see everything in the universe; another that he had prophetic powers; another that the Lord first gave Adam a tail “but subsequently removed it from him for the sake of his dignity.” Adam was “so handsome that the very sole of his foot obscured the splendor of the sun.” He invented all languages and all crafts, including writing and geography. He had a kind of protective skin, a carapace, that f
ell off when he transgressed.

  And then in the second chapter of Genesis, the creature that excited all of these speculations is gone. There are no longer bare bones or a holotype pinned to a card. Instead, there are two separate primordial human figures—the man formed out of dust and the woman fashioned from the man’s rib—and these humans are involved in a story. To understand the actual nature of our kind, Genesis now insists, what is needed is not to examine a type specimen, but rather to watch the first humans in action. We have to observe their relationship, scrutinize their choices, follow their trajectory, and ponder their history. For it is not the biological nature of humans that determined their history, but their history—the choices they made and the consequences of those choices—that determined their nature.

  The Bible story suggests that something happened to the species shortly after it was authored by God. Humanity did not have to turn out to be the way it is now; it could all have been different. The image of the man and the woman in the perfect garden suggests a tension between things as they are and things as they might have been. It conveys a longing to be other than what we have become.

  At the center of the Genesis origin story is the human decision to take, eat, and share the forbidden fruit. The ability of narrative to depict choice and its consequence is crucial. A good story can omit details, forgo motivation, sidestep analysis, and still remain utterly compelling. The story of Adam and Eve does not use such words as “sin” or “fall” or “Satan” or “apple.” The range of possible meanings is wide open: some surviving interpretations from almost two thousand years ago regard the serpent as the story’s hero, for championing the acquisition of knowledge denied to humans by a jealous god. What carries the weight here, as in almost all oral tales, is the action: “And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate.”

  There must be a story to tell: this is the basic intuition not of Genesis alone but of virtually all ancient myths of origin, whether from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Siberia, China, the Great Plains, or Zimbabwe. Something happened at the beginning of time—some history of decision, action, and reaction—that led to the way we are, and if we want to understand the way we are, it is important to remember and retell this story.

  WE KNOW, OR WE THINK WE KNOW, that chimpanzees, to whom we are so closely related, do not speculate on the origin of chimpanzee disobedience, that orangutans, though they are highly intelligent, do not brood about why orangutans are fated to die, and that pleasure-loving bonobos do not tell themselves, while grooming one another, a story about how the first bonobo male and female mated. We have ample reason to be in awe of the social complexity of ants and bees and paper wasps; we marvel at the advanced language comprehension skills of bottlenose dolphins; we have built a virtual cult around the songs of the whales. But none of them, we believe, has invented an origin story.

  Humans seem to be the only animals on earth that ask themselves how they came to be and why they are the way they are. We could represent this uniqueness as an achievement, a mark of distinction, as perhaps it is. But it would be easy enough to seize upon it instead as a sign that we are lost—disoriented, uncomfortable in our own skin, in need of an explanation. Perhaps the telling of an origin story is a symptom of uneasiness—we attempt to calm ourselves by telling a story. Or perhaps our species somehow got ahead of itself, having taken, quite by accident, a developmental turn that led us along a path we cannot entirely understand and that provokes our speculative, storytelling intelligence.

  We have no idea when storytelling became one of our species’ characteristic accomplishments, but the adaptive usefulness of stories, as a way of transmitting knowledge as well as providing pleasure, suggests that it came early, long before the invention of writing. Five thousand years—the approximate length of humankind’s written records—seems an impressively long time, given the length of any individual human life, but in fact it is next to nothing, a mere stutter, in the long history of the stories that humans have made up and recounted to one another. Would speculative accounts of human origins have been among the earliest of these stories? It is striking that small children, unprompted by adults, will ask, “Where do I come from?” The question seems to well up in us spontaneously, and the answers have obsessed priests, artists, philosophers, and scientists for as long as we can remember.

  It was only fairly recently that scholars—the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, in the late eighteenth century, are the most famous—began systematically to collect oral tales and analyze their forms and topics. These tales had passed from generation to generation, extending back beyond any living memory. Some were stubbornly local, confined to a particular family, lineage, or community. Others had evidently leaped across geographical boundaries and languages. Virtually all cultures—from Mongolia to Oklahoma and points between—turned out to have at least one and often more than one origin story. The particular version in Genesis—the story of the naked man and woman, the talking snake, and the magical trees—has every sign of being one of these oral folktales, reaching back long before the moment that it appeared in written form in the book of Genesis, evolving out of the deep past, the past to which we have almost no access.

  When I try to imagine the story’s beginning, I conjure up three scenes from my life. The first and most recent was a garden in Kashan, 150 miles south of Tehran. I had been invited to Iran to address a Shakespeare congress, and I seized the opportunity to venture further afield. Kashan is a celebrated carpet city: when I was growing up, we had a Kashan rug in our dining room, and I would crawl under the table to play on a field of intricately intertwined woven flowers. But my goal was not the crowded bazaar. I wanted to see a famous late-sixteenth-century garden, the Bagh-e Fin.

  The garden turned out to be a relatively small, dusty, square space with very old cedar trees lined up in rows along very straight paths walled in with brick ramparts and circular towers. The key feature was water arising from a nearby natural spring. The water was directed into straight, narrow channels and a perfectly square pool lined with turquoise tiles. At the top of the pool a two-story vaulted pavilion provided an escape from the sun.

  To get there we had driven for hours from Tehran, through a miserably bleak, parched desert, a landscape of sun-baked rocks and scorched, twisted gullies stretching out all the way to the horizon. As far as the eye could see, there were no cultivated fields, no trees, not even scrub vegetation. Signs of life seemed to have been canceled as if by edict. It would have been possible in a very few minutes for the first human to name all the creatures who could be seen inhabiting this world.

  Old Persian had a word for an enclosed garden like the Bagh-e Fin: they termed it a paradaesa. From Greek, which took over the term, we derive our word “paradise.” The garden I saw in Kashan could hardly count as a setting for the creation of Adam and Eve, but I could at least imagine how in a harsh, barren land the sound of the water bubbling through its channels and the sight of the massive trees could produce wonderment and euphoria. And for the first time I fully grasped the hyperbolic extravagance of the garden in Genesis, with the headwaters of no fewer than four great rivers. The storyteller had taken what was precious in the surrounding world and fashioned from it a landscape fit for humans at their most blessed. To be driven forth from that space into the miserable salt desert that surrounded it on all sides would have been the harshest of punishments.

  The second of my attempts to conjure the story’s beginning occurred a few years earlier in Wadi Rum in Jordan, at a Bedouin encampment where I briefly stayed with my wife and son. It was quite cold in the desert once the sun had set, and after eating a simple meal and listening to some music played on a lute, we walked quickly to our small tent and crawled under the woolen blankets. But inevitably in the night, after having drunk so many cups of sweetened tea, I had to get up and cross to the other
end of the encampment. Shivering, I lit my tiny flashlight and walked across the sand—it was a moonless night, the fire and the lanterns were out, and everyone was asleep.

  When I looked up, I saw a sky implausibly, impossibly vast. It was not only full of stars, but also full of a strange feeling of depth. I turned off the flashlight and sat down on the ground and stared. I have often slept under the stars in places reasonably far from human settlements. But even distant cities throw off a tremendous amount of light. Here there was no interfering light at all; only a sense of the sheer immensity of the universe, an infinity of stars, and a need, more compelling even than the body’s imperatives, to understand who we are and where we come from.

  My third attempt reaches back still further in time to a memory from my earliest childhood. We are sitting, my mother and I, at a little table in our apartment in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. It is summer, the window is open, and we can hear, from the nearby Franklin Park Zoo, the occasional roar of the lions and the screeching of the caged birds. My mother is making up a story, and it is just for me. The hero bears a name quite similar but not identical to my own. A cherished child, happy and protected, he has been strictly warned not to do only one thing: he must never, ever attempt by himself to cross Seaver Street, in order to reach the zoo whose sounds so allure him. But does he listen … ?