Where does the caveman and his family as they call him, fit into the time line? Were they at the time of the dinosaurs or after, and how does this fit with Adam and Eve if they were the first man and woman? thanks
You’re going to see different opinions here. I’ll give you my understanding.
(1) The Church does not bind us to interpret Genesis as 100% absolute literal historical history. It holds that those specific details are for science to review. But it does bind us to believe that there was a historical first true man and woman (who we call Adam and Eve) who sinned against God and that all true men and women are descended from them and have inherited original sin from them. The idea of a garden, of a fruit, may be taken as symbols in place of historical fact. Or to state it another way, there was a historical event that is recorded in Genesis through a lot of symbols. You’re also welcome to believe in an absolutely literal interpretation.
(2) Let’s say you choose to go with the “history told with symbols” route. Our best scientific understanding is that dinosaurs lived over 65,000,000 years before humans ever walked the earth. Cave men did not come until long after.
How do cave me fit with Adam and Eve? That’s a loaded question, and one we don’t have a clear answer on. On the one hand, biologically, it doesn’t appear there was ever just two human beings. On the other, we’re bound by faith to believe there were only two. Can that seeming discrepancy be resolved? Some believe so. Now, this next part is only a speculative, possible way to resolve the issue. It’s not absolute. It’s not bound by faith. It’s not necessarily the only resolution. But some have proposed a distinction between biological humans without a rational soul (who would be very, very smart and social animals but incapable of abstract thinking) and true humans, who are biologically the same but have a rational soul. Some propose that there was a large population of biological humans, but at some point God created the first two, true humans (Adam and Eve). They sinned against God, and their descendants interbred with the biologically identical proto-humans, and the offspring between these couplings were born with rational souls and so were true humans, and eventually all remaining humans had rational souls. It offers an explanation for where Adam and Eve’s children found spouses. Even with abstract thinking, their children would have had a very primitive culture and language and may not have seemed leaps above the proto-humans at that point in history.
If instead one believes all reality was created about 6,000 years ago, the explanation would be different.
Now, is this something you can or want to try explaining to your granddaughters? I don’t know how old they are. Perhaps you can just tell them what we must believe as Catholics and that some questions have to be answered by science, and some questions we may never have a perfect answer to, not because there aren’t answers, but because it’s hard to get perfect facts on events and culture from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
