Where did we come from?
One of the perennially annoying things about the "historical Adam" discussion is theologians' obsession with Homo sapiens. I've tried to explain on more than one occasion that looking for Adam at the base of the sapiens family tree is basically looking in the wrong place. Other than William Lane Craig, I can't think of a single theistic evolutionist actively placing Adam deeper in the human family tree.
For myself, I follow creationist research that extends back thirty years and indicates that Homo erectus is also human (probably some others too, but they have less evidence so I'll stick to erectus). There are lots of different reasons that creationists see things this way, including the sophisticated stone handaxes associated with erectus, the postcranial skeleton of Nariokotome boy, and the remarkable global mobility of these ancient people. Homo erectus is the first hominin in the fossil record that's found in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
If you follow anthropology even casually, you've probably heard of the "Out of Africa" model of human origins, which places the ancestral origin of Homo sapiens in Africa. One reason anthropologists favor this model is that Africa is the site of the oldest Homo sapiens remains, at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. Another bigger reason for favoring Africa is the genetic evidence that shows our oldest and most genetically diverse indigenous populations come from sub-Saharan Africa.
Consequently, if you're looking for Adam at the base of the Homo sapiens tree, you need to contend with this evidence. Now I suppose you could do that with a variety of arguments, but what if those arguments were unnecessary? I already mentioned that my view is that Homo erectus is one of the first humans we encounter in the fossil record. Where do they come from?
Now here's where things get really interesting. Under evolutionary assumptions, most of the non-human hominins like Australopithecus are found in Africa, and since these are supposedly our nearest relative, Homo erectus is believed to originate in Africa. When we actually look at the earliest sites of erectus or unknown putative humans (unknown because the evidence is indirect), then we find a story that's quite a bit more ambiguous.
The map above shows a few sites where we have multiple lines of evidence of human or Homo erectus presence (or in the case of Modjokerto, actual cranial fossil). Obviously, I'm referring there to conventional radiometric dating, which I cautiously interpret as relative but not absolute dates. I've taken these sites from a list published in a recent paper by Curran and colleagues. They report dates for a few animal bones with butchery marks on them from a site in Romania that's in the same sediment system as nearby sites with stone tools. Looking at their paper, you might imagine that the results are pretty thin and not very noteworthy, and you'd be wrong.
In their supplementary data, they give a chart with 51 sites that range from 1.1 to 2.6 Ma. Some of the reports they cite are pretty recent, and the emerging picture is one of just vast uncertainty as to the geographic origin of human beings like Homo erectus. My map is based on their chart, using sites with multiple lines of evidence, but based on the full chart, there are really old sites (>2.4 Ma) in Algeria, Jordan and Israel, India, and China. That's on par with the oldest African Homo erectus remains.
So where do people really come from? That's a very good question, and the data as I see it would support multiple different locations. Maybe even one in Southwestern Asia, the traditional landing site of the Ark.
As always, because the paper is open source, don't just take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.
Curran et al. 2025. Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago. Nature Communications 16:836.
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