Few charts, however, had attempted to depict the flow of change through successive faunas. But this elaborate version from 1860, inserted as a large fold-out (eight by fourteen inches in my copy) into an ordinary octavo book, shows the history of life in three layers, with dinosaurs and their allies on the bottom, large mammals in the middle (including the nearly obligatory giant ground sloth, mammoth, and Irish elk), and modern creatures in a top layer that also affirms a human presence by including the great pyramids of Egypt in the upper right.
Although authors usually describe such pictures as supposedly unbiased factual summaries, nearly all complex representations must, whether consciously or not, express favored theories about patterns and causes for the history of life. This author, at least, makes no bones (bad pun) about the didactic character of her chart. In particular, she depicts the first two layers as a continuous development, even though the basic faunas of the two stages differ so profoundly. In a dramatic middle location, to reinforce this central claim, Iguanodon (then falsely depicted in a crocodilian pose, but now recognized as a bipedal duckbilled dinosaur) slithers up a slope connecting the two layers.
But the top layer of modern life has been completely severed from all that came before by an intervening lifeless interval, depicted as a forbidding, ice-covered world. The original chart intensifies the theme by printing this lifeless layer in stark white, thus establishing a marked contrast with the three faunas, all overprinted in a soothing yellowish pink. Obviously the author believed that life’s history includes two distinct phases: a long older. period of continuity and at least occasional change, abruptly terminated by a cold and lifeless world and then followed by the much shorter interval of modern organisms.
To state the first conundrum: The book containing this plate appeared in 1860 under anonymous authorship, and with the title Pre-Adamite Man: The Story of Our Old Planet and Its Inhabitants. I have never before been so unsuccessful in searching through the literature, but I have found absolutely nothing about the life or other works of the author beyond her name: Isabelle Duncan. I have frequently written about the sadness and anger of women naturalists in these Victorian times. They often published anonymously in highly restricted formats of sentimentalized effusions and versifications for children or dilettantes, although several of these women developed fully professionalized skills and longed for equal participation with male colleagues. But one can usually find some documentation in standard bibliographic listings, or in the scholarship of modern feminist historians, who have taken the rehabilitation, or at least the identification, of these forgotten women as a mission and solemn duty.
A highly original history of life shown in three successive scenes, bottom to top: dinosaurs, large mammals of the Ice Age, and modern creatures. By Isabelle Duncan, 1860.
Nonetheless, I have located nary an informative word about Isabelle Duncan. I may well have missed something, and I would be grateful for any assistance from readers (whose commentaries, expansions, and corrections have given me so much pleasure, and granted me so much enlightenment, over the years).8 I can at least say that other scholars who devoted far more time to the search came up equally empty-handed. Rudwick himself simply writes, “The author is now obscure, but in its time the book was evidently not: it had reached a fourth edition within a couple of years.” The most important scholarly work on the Pre-Adamite theory, R. H. Popkin’s biography of the movement’s founder (Isaac La Peyrère (1506–1676): His Life, Work and Influence [E. J. Brill, 1987]), gives a short summary of the contents, but only refers to the author as “one Isabella Duncan”—the conventional way to say “I know her name, but otherwise zilch, zippo, nada, goose eggs, and bugger-all about her.”
Given the barely post-Darwinian date of Duncan’s book (The Origin of Species had appeared the year before, in 1859), one might assume that Duncan wrote to introduce lay readers to new discoveries in geology and anthropology, and to prepare them for assessing (whether pro or con) the onslaught of Darwin’s revisions to traditional views about human history. But her motivation arose from an entirely different, and now nearly invisible, source—the subject of our second riddle: an old theory of biblical exegesis that can be traced to some of the early church fathers, but that arose in explicit form amid the millenarian movements of the mid-seventeenth century, and then kicked around (attracting at least the passing interest of such famous characters as Spinoza, Voltaire, Napoleon, and Goethe) until geological discoveries about the earth’s great age, combined with anthropological findings of prehistoric human artifacts, pushed the subject into a renewed light of Darwinian debate.
The problem that inspired this so-called Pre-Adamite theory—the claim that humans existed before Adam, and that the man described in the first chapters of Genesis only denotes God’s later creation of the Jews and other allied peoples—must have occurred to anyone who ever read the Bible with a critical eye. Several passages in Genesis, if taken at face value, seem to imply the existence of pre-Adamites. The subject may never come up in polite company, but if Adam and Eve mark a unique creation as a single pair, then whom did their son Cain marry? His unnamed sister, we must assume (at least if we wish to avoid the even more repugnant Oedipal alternative). But can we accept such incest at our very roots (although, admittedly, the story of Lot’s daughters indicates some affinity for the theme within the Book of Genesis).
More explicitly, why did God need to place a mark upon Cain after he killed his brother Abel? God punishes Cain, who had been “a tiller of the ground,” by ordaining that the soil, having imbibed his brother’s blood, will never produce a crop for him again—and that he must therefore become “a fugitive and a vagabond . . . in the earth.” But Cain begs for mitigation by pleading “every one that findeth me shall slay me.” So God relents and places the famous mark upon him: “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (Genesis 4:15). But why did Cain need such a fancy ID, if no one else (except, perhaps, a few unnamed sibs) then inhabited the earth?
Moreover, what interpretation should we give to the two famously ambiguous passages of Genesis 6? First, the statement in verse 2 “that the sons of God saw the daughters of men . . . [and] took them wives.” (Now, are the sons members of Adam’s line and the daughters of some other stock, or vice versa? In either case, the comment seems to designate two distinct lineages, one perhaps pre-Adamic.) Second, the initial phrase of verse 4: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The Hebrew word Nephilim may be ambiguous, and King James’s translators may have goofed in imputing gigantic proportions, but one can easily read the comment as a reference to some kind of pre-Adamic stock.
At an opportune time in the midst of millennial anxieties sweeping Europe after the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Isaac La Peyrère, a French Protestant intellectual in the employ of the powerful Prince of Condé, joined these traditional doubts with a new exegetical argument to launch the pre-Adamite theory in 1655. His book, published in liberal Amsterdam and translated into English the next year (under the title Men Before Adam), created a goodly stir and caused its author a peck of trouble. La Peyrère was arrested and severely questioned. He finally accepted what we would call a plea bargain today—namely, that all would be forgiven if he converted to Catholicism, repented his pre-Adamite heresy, and apologized personally to the Pope, which he did (to Alexander VII) early in 1657.
The put-up nature of the job stands out in two tales, probably true according to Popkin, about La Peyrère’s meeting with Alexander VII—that the General of the Jesuit order told La Peyrère how he and the Pope had “laughed delightedly” when they read the book, and that the Pope apparently said, upon meeting this “dangerous” heretic: “Let us embrace this man who is before Adam.” In any case, La Peyrère never abandoned his theory, lived another twenty years, and died near Paris as a lay member of the Seminary of Oratorians. (In his later defenses of the pre-Adamite theor
y, La Peyrère followed the cautious route that Galileo had rejected thirty years before. He simply stated that the idea held great interest, made eminent sense of all the evidence, but could not be true because the Church had so decreed.)
La Peyrère proposed his theory from a millenarian and universalistic perspective. If God had created Adam as the progenitor of Jewish history, and if other races had previously existed, then the Jews must lead all people to a final redemption. La Peyrère focused upon the traditional Christian belief that a Jewish conversion would herald the blessed millennium. This time must now be at hand. The Jewish Messiah would soon appear and, in league with the King of France, return to Jerusalem in triumph, where both men would reign over a unified and fully Christian world. France, as a tolerant nation, must seek and welcome a Jewish influx, for if these favored people could be gathered together without constraint or persecution, then their Messiah would surely come.
Ironically, in stark contrast with La Peyrère’s messianic view that all people, Adamite and pre-Adamite alike, would be equally redeemed, most subsequent (especially nineteenth-century) invocations of pre-Adamism used the doctrine to support racism—particularly the “polygenist” theory that each major human race arose as a separately created species, with Adam as the final progenitor of superior white folks (the latest with the mostest, so to speak), and several earlier Pre-Adams, one for each lower race (the firstest with the leastest). In other words, whites are Adamites; all other people are inferior pre-Adamites.
My interest in the history of pre-Adamism stems from its status as such a radically different way to treat a subject so central to the sciences—the origin and history of human diversity. In our secular age, we feel convinced (and rightly so, I would argue) that the empirical methods of science must be employed to answer such basically factual questions (while religion takes legitimate interest in entirely different spiritual questions about the meaning of life, and ethical inquiries about the proper conduct of life). But pre-Adamism rep-resents, for someone trained in science, a “weirdly different” approach—one that should be called basically literary or hermeneutic rather than religious per se, even though analysis focuses upon a religious text, namely the Bible.
Pre-Adamite theorists formulated and justified their arguments by interpretation of scripture, rather than by appeal to factual information from the burgeoning sciences of anthropology and geology (although supporters of pre-Adamism also used the data, first of voyages of exploration leading to contact with diverse peoples throughout the world, and then of the fossil record and the discovery of deep time, to buttress their fundamentally textual thesis). I find the notion of such a parallel tradition fascinating, primarily for what it reveals about the diversity of human approaches—some ultimately fruitful, others doomed by false premises from the start—to difficult common problems. Pre-Adamism and science run on two parallel tracks, working by entirely different initial assumptions, methods of argument, and standards of proof. The two approaches also span roughly the same period, for La Peyrère’s founding document appeared at the dawn of Newton’s generation, the traditional origin for modern science as a dominant worldview; while the triumph of an evolutionary account by the end of the nineteenth century removed the underpinnings of exegetical pre-Adamism as a theory about actual datings and timings for the origin of various human groups.
Thus we must understand La Peyrère’s theory not as a kooky exercise in biblical apologetics, but as a courageous and radical claim within the conventional theology of his day (in both Catholic and Protestant circles). For, by arguing that the Pentateuch—the Bible’s first five books, traditionally attributed to Moses as sole and divinely inspired author—only described the local history of the Jewish people, and not the entire chronology of all humans, La Peyrère challenged a precept that almost no scholar had ever dared to question in public (though private doubts and thoughts had always been rife): the conviction that the Bible, as the inspired word of God, means exactly what it says. In so doing, La Peyrère helped to open the floodgates to a major theological movement that has swept the field of religious studies ever since, again in parallel with science (by using rational literary, rather than rational empirical, techniques): “higher criticism” and other exegetical approaches dedicated to interpreting the Bible as a fallible document, cobbled together from numerous sources of varying reliability, but subject to deeper understanding when all questions may be asked (and answers sought without fear), and no dogmas need be obeyed a priori.
We sense the difference and distance between these parallel roads of exegetical and scientific approaches to human prehistory when we describe the foundation of La Peyrère’s argument—a claim that scientists might read as almost laughably arcane and irrelevant to any “real” inquiry about human origins, but that played an important role in this different hermeneutical tradition of literary interpretation. La Peyrère cited the usual arguments from Genesis, as noted above, but he centered his theory upon a novel, if peculiar, interpretation of a single passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (5:12–14):
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression. . . .
Now, here’s the rub: traditional (and probably accurate) readings interpret “the law” as referring to Moses’ receipt of God’s word in the Pentateuch. The passage then states that although Adam had sinned, his sin could not be “officially” imputed to people until Moses received the divine word that specified the nature of Adam’s transgression, and the price that all subsequent people must pay (the doctrine of original sin). Nonetheless, all pre-Mosaic people had to suffer death as a result of Adam’s sin, even those who lived righteously and never disobeyed God in “the similitude of Adam’s transgression”—and even though they had not yet received the law from Moses, and therefore could not fully understand why they must die.
As we say in the modern vernacular, “I got no problem with that”—but La Peyrère did, and for a definite (if entirely idiosyncratic) reason. La Peyrère insisted that Paul’s invocation of “the law” referred to God’s instructions to Adam, not to his dispensation to Moses. Now, if “sin was in the world” before the law, and Adam first received the law, and if only people could sin—well then, ipso facto and QED, people must have existed before Adam’s creation. Most folks today, scientists and theologians alike, would consider this reading as a woefully thin foundation for such a radical chain of consequences. But so be it; autres temps, autres moeurs (other times, other customs), as they say in La Peyrère’s country.
We need this background, and this concept of science and literary exegesis as parallel tracks in the exploration of human prehistory, to understand Isabelle Duncan’s book and theory with any sympathy—for her ideas sound kooky even beyond La Peyrère’s vision about the King of France all buddy-buddy with a Jewish Messiah in a blissful world to come. Yet, when we understand that her argument emerges not from science, but from a tradition of biblical exegesis trying to harmonize itself with science, then her mode of reasoning becomes clearer (even though her particular claims don’t, and can’t, improve in plausibility). Rudwick states this important point in writing of Duncan’s book: “Such a theory may now seem bizarre, but it belongs . . . to a flourishing Anglo-American subculture of biblically based cosmological speculations, often with powerful social and racial implications.”
Duncan, facing the new Darwinian world of 1860, should not be compared too strictly with La Peyrère, plunged into the millenarian fervors of mid-seventeenth-century Europe. But both do belong to a biblical tradition larger than their own particular pre-Adamite conclusions—a reconciliationist rather than a contrarian approach to science and other secular studies based on empirical evidence. Reconciliationists accept the Bible as
the truthful and inspired word of God, but also insist that the factual discoveries of science must be respected. Since truth and inspiration don’t require a literal reading, the biblical text may be interpreted, but never denied or controverted, to harmonize with scientific conclusions. Contrarians, with American “young earth creation-ism” as the most prominent modern version, simply know what the Bible says. If science disagrees, then science must be wrong. Case closed.
The classic problem for reconciliationists interested in the emerging sciences of geology and paleontology has always centered upon the apparent claim in Genesis 1 that God created both the cosmos and all living creatures in a sequence of six days, and that the earth, as inferred from biblical chronologies of the patriarchs and kings, cannot be much more than five or six thousand years old. Many long books have been written on this complex subject, but a simplified summary might identify three major traditions in reconciliationist arguments on this crucial topic.
First, the “gap” theory argues that Genesis must be read literally, but that an unspecified amount of time—sufficient to fit anything that geology might discover about the earth’s age—intervened between verse 1 (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”), and the particular descriptions that begin with verse 2.
Second, the “day-age” theory argues that Genesis 1 got the sequence right, but that the Hebrew word yom, translated as “day” in the King James version, may refer to intervals of unspecified duration. So each biblical “day” may represent as long a period of time as geological discovery requires. Third, the “only local” theory holds that Genesis intends to describe only the particular origin of the Jewish people in the Near East, not the full chronology of all earthly time. Adam’s children therefore marry the offspring of earlier people from different regions, and Noah’s flood may be read as a local inundation, therefore avoiding such crushing problems as whether the progenitors of all living species could fit into one boat. Nearly all pre-Adamite theories belong primarily to this third tradition.