Scientists uncover evidence suggesting 'Adam and Eve' lived 200,000 years ago

Adam and Eve's story is a huge part of a number of religions, whether you're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.

While each religion has its own variation of their place in history, the long story-short, according to Christianity, is that they were thought to be the first living man and woman on Earth, created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:4-25). According to the Bible, essentially, everyone else on Earth now is a descendent of them in some way.

However, scientists have been long-skeptical of how their story unfolded (forbidden fruit aside), because a few things just don't quite add up, including the source of male Y chromosomes and female mitochondrial DNA being at least 10,000 years apart, which could bring into question when they were alive.

A quick Google search questioning it will give you a whole host of answers ranging from 6,000 years ago, all the way to 150,000 years ago.

But research is slowly providing more pieces of the puzzle to come together, with studies into DNA giving more accurate suggestions as to when they were around.

The existence of such a ‘mitochondrial Eve' was proven back in 1987, but after analysing DNA from 147 people globally to chart their genetic relationships, researchers used a ‘molecular clock’, based on the number of DNA mutations that arise with each generation, to estimate Eve's age.

Peter Paul Rubens/Wikipedia

The results found that modern humans likely evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, Adam, thought to be the first man (or common ancestor of people with Y chromosomes passed from their father), would have only lived 100,000 years ago, meaning they never existed at the same time.

"It's not so much that we're shifting the mitochondria down," explains Carlos Bustamante, a population geneticist at Stanford University, "which we are, a bit - but we're pushing the Y farther back."

However, a number of other teams have since conducted similar research, and found different results.

A team led by Paolo Francalacci, a population geneticist at the University of Sassari, Italy, studied the Y chromosomes of 1,200 men from the island of Sardinia, and linked their molecular clocks to various points in history to paint a better picture of Adam.

Their conclusion? He probably lived around 180,000-200,000 years ago, the same timeframe as Eve.

Bustamante continues: “When we first started this project I thought, ‘Oh hum-hum we’re going to sequence some Y chromosomes and this is well-trod territory’, but it just kept getting more and more exciting."

It's plausible that the Adam and Eve explored by both scientists and through religion aren't the same people at all, but if proven true, could change everything we thought we knew about their story.

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