The thread is becoming a real pleasure. This time I'll let Mesopotamia speak for itself at the outset:
I'm certainly no expert, but I listened to countless lectures, debates, etc growing up as just a normal part of my childhood. I'm not sure how 'familiar' that makes me compared to any other person.
It makes you more familiar than seemingly innumerable masses of people who aren't as curious and don't care to know such information. It's nice having yourself and several others here to discuss these and other things with, who are also very curious people
I can only give an opinion based on what I've been told and what I can remember, but it's only one interpretation and could be entirely wrong. I also tend to focus more on the historical, literary and genetic aspects of the Bible rather than the spiritual ones. I think at least some of the seemingly 'magical' or 'spiritual' parts only appear that way due to a lack of logical understanding of either those writing the Bible or those reading it. Genesis is a good example of that.
I'd like to suggest that this may not be a methodologically sound way of looking at historically significant literature. It runs contrary to the same historical, literary and genetic aspects of the text which you value to sterilize its spiritual aspects anywhere the theological content can be clearly shown as part of the author's intentions. However without enough substance to work with so far as an idea of how you interpret the text, it remains to be seen what your reasoning looks like here.
I don't believe the other humans mentioned in Genesis are neccessarily 'hominids' (at least, that wasn't what I was taught), just different groups of 'modern' humans that were around back then. We're only talking 10-20k years ago.
That's probably a reasonable time estimate for the maximum lifespan of such detailed oral traditions surviving until they see literary use, but this question has really given me pause over the last couple of years as I've wondered about it and been open to the possibility that oral traditions may very well be able to persist for longer. It's quite remarkable how much people can remember and how fine tuned the transmission process can be
when people preserve information socially.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if very recent hominid groups are discovered because it seems that startlingly recent groups are found every year, just a couple of years ago in the case of a significant amount of Denisovan (a group found in Siberia in 2010) DNA being observed in aboriginal Australians, as much as 5%. The cave in which Denisovans were discovered, called Denisova cave and located in the Altai mountains, contains bone fragments from a Denisovan female who lived approximately 41,000 years ago in the same place as modern humans and Neanderthals.
The debate has been cracked wide open over the course of this young century, concerning whether groups such as Java Men, Denisovans, Cro Magnons, Neanderthals, etc. are separate species or subspecies of Homo Sapiens, with Homo Sapiens Sapiens merely being the subspecies which ended up dominating most of the modern human genome as we proliferated.
Some would have been adapted to the warmer areas that had avoided the ice sheets, others would be adapted to the colder, drier areas covered in snow (which covered most of europe pre-Holocene). But essentially they were all what we would consider modern humans. Even further back, I believe groups such as neanderthals and cro magnon were close enough genetically that they could breed (bar the RH- RH+ issue, which may or may not have been specific to these groups).
They were not only close enough genetically to breed with modern humans, they collectively form a not insignificant portion of the bodies you and I inhabit.
Existing humans were clearly similar enough that they could intermarry with these new 'Adamic' people when they came into contact. We have evidence of modern humans already living in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The Bible is just centred around the Middle East area and events that took place among that population. So this 'Adamic' group isn't describing the creation of modern humans versus existing hominids, just a seemingly unique group of modern humans (unique enough that they and others could differentiate between them).
It's about time we dug into the text itself, eh? Before I do my best to perform what I have to admit is a sadly limited linguistic study, I've some questions to stimulate thought beforehand:
What is it that made people 'Adamic'? Remember we're not thinking in terms of science, we're thinking in terms of what the literature and traditions before them were trying to communicate. How were these people coming out of modern day Iraq supposed to be unique?
Genesis 2:7
Concordant Literal Version (one of the most strict verbatim English translations I'm aware of):
Yahweh Elohim formed the human out of soil from the ground, and He blew into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living soul.
Hebrew transliteration of the Westminster Leningrad Codex (with keywords highlighted for later vocabulary reference), followed by the Hebrew symbols and then a purely verbatim rendering not corrected for English grammar:
mn ophr e-adm - ath aleim ieue u-iitzr chiim
nshmth b-aphi-u u-iphch e-adme : chie
l-nphsh e-adm u-iei
וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם, עָפָר מִן-הָאֲדָמָה, וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו, נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים; וַיְהִי הָאָדָם, לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה.
From soil the human >> Elohim Yahweh and-he-is-forming lives
breath-of in-nostrils-of-him and-he-is-blowing the-ground living
to-soul the-human and-he-is-becoming
The most critical words to look at here, in order of appearance, are
neshamah and
nephesh. As in any ancient language, the philosophy of the people is embedded in the language itself, in stark contrast to the modern languages we use which possess significantly wider vocabularies. In ancient times fewer words were used which had an astounding number of possible implications that could be determined by grammar, presumably intonation (such a question is forever well beyond our means to explore), and overall context within the whole sentence or even implied through whatever subject is being explained over several sentences.
With these two words it's uncanny how similar they are philosophically to the Classical period Greek dialects. It's a common thread between Semitic and Hellenistic languages to understand the breath of an individual as the actual person, so to speak. One's breath was the physical manifestation and furthermore the social extension of one's soul/mind, the seat of thought which they perceived as coming out of the heart (before later Greek philosophers and physicians in ancient Rome the heart was thought of as performing the functions we ascribe to the brain).
Neshamah is the exhalation of the mind and
nephesh is the mind itself.
The implication I'm currently disposed to assume from the text here is that the difference between Adam and the people around him who Cain left his family to interbreed with, is that Adam has a particular thinking capacity which is incorporeal and is supposed to be similar to God's thinking capacity. As we move on in reading this anthropological chapter we see Adam, and by extension his kind, being defined along those lines as he flexes those very muscles. That he is able to be so self aware, to observe the world around him with enough curiosity to name the animals he sees, and to have an existential need for companionship, sounds to me like ancient people trying to explain how an object became a subject. Adam has experiential urges and requirements which just aren't the same as an animal.
