Pre-Adamite
The pre-Adamite hypothesis or pre-Adamism is the theological belief that humans (or intelligent yet non-human creatures) existed before the biblical character Adam.
These titles tend to indicate that Augustine saw pagan ideas concerning both the history of the world and the chronology of the human race as incompatible with the Genesis creation narrative.
Augustine's explanation aligned with most rabbis, and with the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as "myths and fables", whereas Jewish and Christian claims were based on "revealed truth".
[1]: 27 Augustine did take a critical view of the young earth narrative in some aspects, arguing that everything in the universe had been created simultaneously by God, and not seven literal days.
[5]: 230–232 A book titled Nabatean Agriculture, written or translated by Ibn Wahshiyya in 904, collated texts about the activities and beliefs of Arabic groups such as the Nabataeans, in defense of Babylonian culture against Islam.
The rabbi responded that his faith was unshaken, as the Indians lacked "a fixed form of religion, or a book concerning which a multitude of people held the same opinion, and in which no historical discrepancy could be found."
He attributed the concepts to the Sabians and said they were just legends and mythology which deviated from monotheism though drawing on Jewish sources, but in refuting the speculations, he circulated an outline of the ideas among other scholars:[2]: 7–8 "They deem Adam to have been an individual born of male and female like any other human individuals, but they glorify him and say that he was a prophet, the envoy of the moon, who called people to worship the moon.
[6]: 51 In 1591, Giordano Bruno argued that, because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, God must have either created separate Adams or that Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamic races.
[7]: 25–26 The 17th-century French millenarian Isaac La Peyrère is usually credited with formulating the pre-Adamite theory because of his influence on subsequent thinkers and movements.
[8]: 152 The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained Cain's taking of a wife and the building of a city after Abel's murder in the Book of Genesis.
[8]: 154 In 19th-century Europe, pre-Adamism was attractive to those who were intent on demonstrating the inferiority of non-Western peoples, and in the United States, it appealed to those who were attuned to racial theories but found it unattractive to contemplate a common history with non-whites.
The concept of ice ages, pioneered by Louis Agassiz, seemed to provide evidence of such events, drawing the line between the pre-Adamic era and the modern one, which she posited began about 6,000 years ago.
To answer this question, Payne suggested that the "Negro" is a pre-Adamic humam of the field (specifically, a higher order which was preserved on Noah's Ark.
[12]: 149 The Irish lawyer Dominick McCausland, a Biblical literalist and anti-Darwinian polemicist, maintained the theory in order to uphold the Mosaic timescale.
[12]: 150 Hoyle further suggested that Cain was the "mongrel offspring" of Eve's being seduced by "an enticing Mongolian" with whom she had repeated trysts, thus laying the foundation for the white supremacist bio-theology that miscegenation was "an abomination".
[12]: 165–166 The idea that "lower races" are mentioned in the Bible (in contrast to Aryans) was posited in the 1905 book Theozoology: or The Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, an Ariosophist and a volkisch writer who influenced Nazism.
[8]: 177–178 The occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph published Pre-Adamite Man: Demonstrating The Existence of the Human Race Upon the Earth 100,000 Thousand Years Ago!
Being a polygenist, Randolph argued that the color of races, particularly black, was not the result of climate and was proof of separate, pre-Adamite origins.
"[19]: 205 [20] More recently, such ideas have been promoted by Kathryn Kuhlman and Derek Prince among Pentecostals, John Stott among Anglicans, Old Earth creationist Hugh Ross,[21] and computational biologist S. Joshua Swamidass.
