A (50:54)
Yeah, so probably the most common question I get is what about Adam and Eve? Where do they fit into all of this? Because it is kind of, it could be a scientific question, could Adam and Eve be possible? And I always answer, and I'm careful not to answer in class generally, like, I don't need the gospel according to Jamie. Right. But I will tell them like, there's lots of ways that Adam and Eve could fit in, even from a scientific perspective. And I've asked actually a lot of people inside and outside the church, scientists and non scientists, you know, about this. And I spent some time in South Africa following, following around some paleoanthropologists. And one of them is deeply sensitive to religion. And I asked him, where would you put Adam and Eve? And he actually created this really great video for us that I've got on our website under the hover. Hover tool, the H O V R tool. And he talks about where, where can we put Adam and Eve? And, and one of the things to recognize is, is that if you're trying to genetically trace humanity back to Adam and Eve, it's virtually impossible genealogically. We can trace it back. Right. And probably all of you men have the tracing from Adam down to you of the priesthood. So we have these genealogical tracings, but genetically, if you look at the way that human genetics work works, you lose any genetic signature from certain ancestors within maybe 10 generations. So I can have an ancestor, a direct ancestor 10 generations ago with whom I share zero DNA. And that's how quickly it happens. And so within 10 generations, we can't even trace it back anymore. And so could Adam and Eve have been there somewhere? Absolutely. Like there's no way to trace it back. There's no way to disprove that Adam and Eve weren't real. And so, but, but going back, you know, did we ever have a bottleneck in our species? Yeah, there's a lot of places where you could put them. And I think John hawks goes through, Dr. John Hawks on the video goes like 5,000 years ago, you could put them back 50,000 years ago, you could Put them back 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens, our species, and we show up on the scene somewhere between 250 and 300,000 years ago, where we have anatomically similar to us Homo sapiens living on Earth in fairly decent sized populations. And so you could put them all the way back there, or you could put them when, you know, maybe God needed us to evolve a little more, to be more accountable and ready to live the plan of salvation. Wherever that moment was, that's where you could put Adam. So then the question becomes, and I could go through several possibilities, none of these have doctrinal. There is no doctrine on this, right? So you could say that Adam and Eve, you know, by the time humans were in God's image and able to be accountable, right? We had the intellect that was strong enough to be accountable for our actions and actually understand the plan of salvation. Then maybe Adam and Eve were plucked from two Homo sapiens populations and put in the garden. We know in the garden they're in the presence of God. We know from Joseph Smith that weird things happen to your body when you're in the presence of God. And so maybe they're living in this paradisiacal state in the Garden of Eden, these two Homo sapiens that were brought in. That's a possibility. Another possibility is once we were ready, God created, just as he said in the Bible, from the dust of the earth and Adam and an Eve patterned after these species that were living out there, right? And they live in the garden. And when they leave the garden, there's lots of people out there. We hear mentioned in the Bible of the children of men and the children of Adam. So who are those children of men? Maybe those were the ones that were not part of the plan, you know, or are Adam and Eve symbolic? And when humans were ready to live the plan of salvation, when God was ready to send his spirit children to Earth, everybody at that point was an Adam or an Eve. And that's when the plan officially kicked off. Right? Like there's a lot of ways that you can look at it. You know, maybe spirit children weren't coming down and inhabiting the bodies that the spirits in those pre Adam hominids were like a spirit and a dog or a cat. I mean, they were animals, right? And once spirit children started coming to Earth, that's when Adam and Eve were. Or Adam and Eve are entirely symbolic. I kind of like to think that they were real, but, but, but yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of ways you can look at it. But we do know that Homo sapiens, our species, have been running around on this planet for upwards of 300,000 years looking anatomically the same as us. We started putting on clothing and being, you know, clothes 70 to 90,000 years ago. We were living in cities and societies and domesticating animals well beyond 12 to 15,000 years ago. So we know that all these things were happening long before maybe the 6,000 year mark that people sometimes want to put Adam and Eve, just because we have an abundance of historical evidence, natural evidence, that these things were happening long before that. But it doesn't mean Adam and Eve couldn't have been real people. And we cannot genetically trace ourselves back. So there's no way to disprove an Adam and an Eve.