Yes, but science fills in the details in a way that the Catechism or the Bible or our imaginations can’t.
We can imagine that God simply inserted a soul into one of those new generations.
This is homo naledi, tell me he couldn’t be a candidate for Adam and Eve’s biological pre-existing material.
It’s an interesting story, but I don’t think that’s how we were created.
I am supposing you believe the material that was transferred from to Adam would be Naledi gametes. By the time a baby is born, let alone after we develop into adults, that contribution to our physical make-up is infinitessimal, if present at all. They could not be the pre-existing material that was use to form Adam, unless perhaps if he ate them, and even then we incorporate what is other to our bodies after we break it down as it passes through our gastrointestinal system.
I hope this is making sense so far.
To understand the creation of mankind, we should contemplate how we ourselves were created. Sitting here in front of our electronic devices, it’s pretty amazing how this came to be. I’m going to state outright that we are created as persons, from the first cell onwards, and that basic reality, in spite of everything that happens in a lifetime, does not change until death. This is truth, although I recognize that someone else could call it a belief. So a conflict arises between how we see things.
It is easy to say that “God simply inserted a soul into one of those new generations”, but what does it actually mean. Again, the combination of two gametes produces a new creature, not inert matter, but a living thing with a soul that defines its being. The matter of which it is formed is how that being manifests itself in creation. We do not have a soul, but are a soul, which “contains” or perhaps better said, expresses itself through a physical body. The only way I can imagine something happening along the lines that you are considering is that God created Adam as a zygote in a Naldi womb. He would not have done so using a Naldi sperm and ovum, because that would have produced another Naldi.
You may disagree, but hopefully it makes sense.
Maybe God did it that way, and we can then imagine how Eve could have been created from a sleeping embryonic Adam. There’s more to us than what we experience in our daily lives. We do exist in eternity, and the fullness of truth about the Garden is beyond my pay grade. At any rate, God could have done it any way He chose. As I said in the post you are addressing, Naldi could be simply like a preliminary sketch to arrive at what we should look like and how to best function in the world. He could have created Eve by actually taking a rib from a fully formed Adam. He’s God.
