Although this theory furnishes a plausible explanation of certain Biblical facts, such as the marriage of Cain (Gen. 4:17), Cain's fear that men would slay him (Gen. 4:14), and the distinction between “the sons of God” and “the daughters of men” (Gen. 6:1, 2), it treats the [pg 477]Mosaic narrative as legendary rather than historical. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, it is intimated, may have lived hundreds of years apart from one another (409). Upon this view, Eve could not be “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20), nor could the transgression of Adam be the cause and beginning of condemnation to the whole race (Rom. 5:12, 19). As to Cain's fear of other families who might take vengeance upon him, we must remember that we do not know how many children were born to Adam between Cain and Abel, nor what the age of Cain and Abel was, nor whether Cain feared only those that were then living. As to Cain's marriage, we must remember that even if Cain married into another family, his wife, upon any hypothesis of the unity of the race, must have been descended from some other original Cain that married his sister.
See Keil and Delitzsch, Com. on Pentateuch, 1:116—“The marriage of brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of children of the first man, in case the human race was actually to descend from a single pair, and may therefore be justified, in the face of the Mosaic prohibition of such marriages, on the ground that the sons and daughters of Adam represented not merely the family but the genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families that the bonds of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from one another and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the violation of which is sin.” Prof. W. H. Green: “Gen. 20:12 shows that Sarah was Abraham's half-sister;...the regulations subsequently ordained in the Mosaic law were not then in force.” G. H. Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, has shown that marriage between cousins is harmless where there is difference of temperament between the parties. Modern palæontology makes it probable that at the beginning of the race there was greater differentiation of brothers and sisters in the same family than obtains in later times. See Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:275. For criticism of the doctrine that there were men before Adam, see Methodist Quar. Rev., April, 1881:205-231; Presb. Rev., 1881:440-444.
The Scripture statements are corroborated by considerations drawn from history and science. Four arguments may be briefly mentioned:
1. The argument from history.
So far as the history of nations and tribes in both hemispheres can be traced, the evidence points to a common origin and ancestry in central Asia.
The European nations are acknowledged to have come, in successive waves of migration, from Asia. Modern ethnologists generally agree that the Indian races of America are derived from Mongoloid sources in Eastern Asia, either through Polynesia or by way of the Aleutian Islands. Bunsen, Philos. of Universal History, 2:112—the Asiatic origin of all the North American Indians “is as fully proved as the unity of family among themselves.” Mason, Origins of Invention, 361—“Before the time of Columbus, the Polynesians made canoe voyages from Tahiti to Hawaii, a distance of 2300 miles.” Keane, Man Past and Present, 1-15, 349-440, treats of the American Aborigines under two primitive types: Longheads from Europe and Roundheads from Asia. The human race, he claims, originated in Indomalaysia and spread thence by migration over the globe. The world was peopled from one center by Pleistocene man. The primary groups were evolved each in its special habitat, but all sprang from a Pleiocene precursor 100,000 years ago. W. T. Lopp, missionary to the Eskimos, at Port Clarence, Alaska, on the American side of Bering Strait, writes under date of August 31, 1892: “No thaws during the winter, and ice blocked in the Strait. This has always been doubted by whalers. Eskimos have told them that they sometimes crossed the Strait on ice, but they have never believed them. Last February and March our Eskimos had a tobacco famine. Two parties (five men) went with dogsleds to East Cape, on the Siberian coast, and traded some beaver, otter and marten skins for Russian tobacco, and returned safely. It is only during an occasional winter that they can do this. But every summer they make several trips in their big wolf-skin boats—forty feet long. These observations may throw some light upon the origin of the prehistoric races of America.”
Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48—“The semi-civilized nations of Java and Sumatra are found in possession of a civilization which at first glance shows itself to have been borrowed from Hindu and Moslem sources.” See also Sir Henry Rawlinson, quoted in Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 156, 157; Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 223-236; Pickering, Races of Man, Introd., synopsis, and page 316; Guyot, Earth and Man, 298-334; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, and Unité de l'Espèce Humaine; [pg 478]Godron, Unité de l'Espèce Humaine, 2:412 sq. Per contra, however, see Prof. A. H. Sayce: “The evidence is now all tending to show that the districts in the neighborhood of the Baltic were those from which the Aryan languages first radiated, and where the race or races who spoke them originally dwelt. The Aryan invaders of Northwestern India could only have been a late and distant offshoot of the primitive stock, speedily absorbed into the earlier population of the country as they advanced southward; and to speak of ‘our Indian brethren’ is as absurd and false as to claim relationship with the negroes of the United States because they now use an Aryan language.” Scribner, Where Did Life Begin? has lately adduced arguments to prove that life on the earth originated at the North Pole, and Prof. Asa Gray favors this view; see his Darwiniana, 205, and Scientific Papers, 2:152; so also Warren, Paradise Found; and Wieland, in Am. Journal of Science, Dec. 1903:401-430. Dr. J. L. Wortman, in Yale Alumni Weekly, Jan. 14, 1903:129—“The appearance of all these primates in North America was very abrupt at the beginning of the second stage of the Eocene. And it is a striking coincidence that approximately the same forms appear in beds of exactly corresponding age in Europe. Nor does this synchronism stop with the apes. It applies to nearly all the other types of Eocene mammalia in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the accompanying flora as well. These facts can be explained only on the hypothesis that there was a common centre from which these plants and animals were distributed. Considering further that the present continental masses were essentially the same in the Eocene time as now, and that the North Polar region then enjoyed a subtropical climate, as is abundantly proved by fossil plants, we are forced to the conclusion that this common centre of dispersion lay approximately within the Arctic Circle.... The origin of the human species did not take place on the Western Hemisphere.”