Where Art Thou Adam?

 (An SSP2 assignment that drove me berserk!)

       

The thought of coming from apes was not, after all, the end of the shocking discoveries science could make in its mind-boggling search for the creation of man. Now, it brings us back to the story of the Garden of Eden to find the father of all human beings — Adam.

          So do we share the same ancestor? Three of the greatest religions on Earth —Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — believe that society started with one man. So science wants to create a “genetic time machine” to prove this stupendous claim, and that is through the DNA. This genetic material is said to consist of ancestral identity, saying that it stays almost constant in all with a virtually unchanged Y-chromosome, which all sons inherit from their fathers.

          The process of actually tracing the family tree seems almost impossible! With the world population estimated to be 6, 602, 224, 175, would this experiment be feasible? What are the chances that we are really related now that family trees have probably entangled due to “cross breeding”?

          As science continues to branch into further specific studies, knowledge has become more complex, sometimes almost difficult to understand and believe. But somehow, this attempt bridges the layman’s comprehension and the scientists’.

           To start the Genographic Project, Spencer Wells began with a simple methodology of traversing the world to get people to be used as “human specimens”. Wells and his group would swab cotton in the mouth to get cheek cells, and then bring back the samples to the laboratory to be studied and traced if they really do have a common ancestry.

           Amazingly, when this experiment was performed in San Francisco, USA, two out of four people, who are Mongolians, really do have a common ancestor— Genghis Khan. But why do most Mongolians believe that they came from this infamous warrior? History says that during the Khan dynasty, he dominated vast lands and took women as captives, and therefore might have taken them as sex slaves and they reproduced. And since then, scientists have gone to different places to trace the Scientific Adam.

            Adam has probably fathered billions, but the Bible gives no descriptions of what he looks like, even Eve. The Bible is a book of faith, not of forensics, so why waste time? Moreover, what are the chances that he is one of those “apes” linking man to the monkeys?

          Aside from the Mongolians believing that they are descendants of Genghis Khan, an Ethiopian Royal family also believes that they came from the bloodline of King Solomon, another descendant of Adam. A family member agreed to be part of the experiment, but wanted to remain anonymous. His result mapped out a Middle Eastern lineage.

          As of the findings scientists have made, there are three birthplaces of humankind, namely Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Although it has been narrowed down into three, these pieces of land are still too vast to actually dig pieces to fit the puzzle of human ancestry. Although the possibilities that we all came from the same lineage are big, the potentials of tracing it up to Adam gives an air of implausibility. Moreover, cultures have intermingled through history. For example, some of the traders who had navigated their way to almost all the directions of the map have had sex with the natives, and later on gave birth to their children. True enough, family trees have become so complicated, branching out to marriages between different nationalities, and bearing children of mixed backgrounds.

          But would people agree that somehow they are linked to the “deadliest person alive”? That would seem a better and more favorable linkage than having something to do with the apes! Would “mortal enemies” also agree that they are related? That perhaps would make Earth as peaceful as Eden once we have already found out that we are actually brothers and sisters. But then again, with the modern caste system evident in present the society, some might still refuse to believe that they are connected to the lower caste.

          With something as complicated as this, religion and science ironically seem to have converged in search for the Scientific Adam. It would be interesting to see Christians and Muslims at peace, but that would not probably happen until hell freezes over!