9 - THE MOTHER CALLED EVE


By tracing Hebrew words in the Bible through their Akkadian stem to their Sumerian origin it has been possible to understand the true meaning of biblical tales, especially those in the Book of Genesis. The fact that so many Sumerian terms had more than one meaning, mostly but not always derived from a common original pictograph, constitutes a major difficulty in understanding Sumerian and requires reading them carefully in context. On the other hand, the propensity of Sumerian writers to use that for frequent plays of words, makes their texts an intelligent reader’s joy.


Dealing, for example, with the biblical tale of the “upheavaling” of Sodom and Gomorrah in The Wars of Gods and Men, I pointed out that the notion that Lot’s wife was turned into a “pillar of salt” when she stayed back to watch what was happening, in fact meant “pillar of vapor” in the original Sumerian terminology. Since salt was obtained in Sumer from vapor-filled swamps, the original Sumerian term NI.MUR came to mean both “salt” and “vapor.” Poor Lot’s wife was vaporized, not turned into salt, by the nuclear blasts that caused the upheaval of the cities of the plain.


Regarding the biblical tale of Eve, it was the great Sumerologist Samuel N. Kramer who first pointed out that her name, which meant in Hebrew “She who has life,” and the tale of her origin from Adam’s rib in all probability stemmed from the Sumerian play on the word TI, which meant both “life” and “rib.”


Some other original or double meanings in the creation tales have already been mentioned in a previous chapter. More can be gleaned about “Eve” and her origins from comparisons of the biblical tales with the Sumerian texts and an analysis of Sumerian terminology.


The genetic manipulations, we have seen, were conducted by Enki and Ninti in a special facility called, in the Akkadian versions, Bit Shimti—“House where the wind of life is breathed in”; this meaning conveys a pretty accurate idea of what the purpose of the specialized structure, a laboratory, was. But here we have to invite into the discussion the Sumerian penchant for word play, thereby throwing fresh light on the source of the tale of Adam’s rib, the use of clay, and the breaths of life.
 

The Akkadian term, as earlier stated, was a rendering of the Sumerian SHI.IM.TI, a compound word in which each of the three components conveyed a meaning that combined with, strengthened, and expanded the other two. SHI stood for what the Bible called Nephesh, commonly translated “soul” but more accurately meaning “breath of life.”

 

IM had several meanings, depending on the context. It meant “wind,” but it could also mean “side.” In astronomical texts it denoted a satellite that is “by the side” of its planet; in geometry it meant the side of a square or triangle; and in anatomy it meant “rib.” To this day the parallel Hebrew word Sela means both the side of a geometric shape and a person’s rib. And, lo and behold, IM also had a totally unrelated fourth meaning: “clay.”... As if the multiple meanings “wind”/”side”/”rib”/”clay” of IM were not enough, the term TI added to the Sumerians’ linguistic fun.

 

It meant, as previously mentioned, both “life” and “rib”—the latter being the parallel of the Akkadian situ, from which came the Hebrew Sela. Doubled, TI.TI meant “belly”—that which held the fetus; and, lo and behold, in Akkadian titu acquired the meaning “clay,” from which the Hebrew word Tit has survived. Thus, the component TI of the laboratory’s Sumerian name, SHI.IM.TI, we have the meanings “life”/”clay",”belly",”rib.”


In the absence of the original Sumerian version from which the compilers of Genesis might have obtained their data, one cannot be sure whether they had chosen the “ ‘rib” interpretation because it was conveyed by both IM and TI or because it gave them an opening to making a social statement in the ensuing verses:

And Yahweh Elohim caused a deep sleep
upon the Adam, and he slept.
And He look one of his ribs
and closed up the flesh in its place.
And Yahweh Elohim constructed of the rib

which He had taken from the Adam a woman,

and He brought her to the Adam.
And the Adam said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
flesh of my flesh.”

Therefore is the being called Ish-sha [”Woman”] because out of Ish [”Man”] was this one taken. Therefore doth a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife to become as one flesh.


This tale of the creation of Man’s female counterpart relates how the Adam, having already been placed in the E.DIN to till it and tend its orchards, was all alone. “And Yahweh Elohim said, it is not good that the Adam is by himself; let me make him a mate.” This obviously is a continuation of the version whereby The Adam alone was created, and not part of the version whereby Mankind was created male and female right away.


In order to resolve this seeming confusion, the sequence of creating the Earthlings must be borne in mind. First the male lulu, “mixed one” was perfected; then the fertilized eggs of Apewoman, bathed and mixed with the blood serum and sperm of a young Anunnaki, were divided into batches and placed in a “mold,” where they acquired either male or female characteristics. Reimplanted in the wombs of Birth Goddesses, the embryos produced seven males and seven females each time. But these “mixed ones” were hybrids, which could not procreate (as mules cannot). To get more of them, the process had to be repeated over and over again.


At some point it became apparent that this way of obtaining the serfs was not good enough; a way had to be found to get more of these humans without imposing the pregnancies and deliveries on female Anunnaki. That way was a second genetic manipulation by Enki and Ninti, giving The Adam the ability to procreate on his own. To be able to have offspring, Adam had to mate with a fully compatible female. How and why she was brought into being is the story of the Rib and of the Garden of Eden.


The tale of the Rib reads almost like a two-sentence summary of a report in a medical journal. In no uncertain terms it describes a major operation of the kind that makes headlines nowadays, when a close relative (for example, a father or a sister) donates an organ for transplant. Increasingly, modern medicine resorts to the transplantation of bone marrow when the malady is a cancer or affects the immune system. The donor in the biblical case is Adam. He is given general anesthesia and is put to sleep.

 

An incision is made and a rib is removed. The flesh is then pulled together to close up the wound, and Adam is allowed to rest and recover. The action continues elsewhere. The Elohim now use the piece of bone to construct a woman; not to create a woman, but to “construct” one. The difference in terminology is significant; it indicates that the female in question already existed but required some constructive manipulation to become a mate for Adam. Whatever was needed was obtained from the rib, and the clue to what the rib supplied lies in the other meanings of IM and TI—life, belly, clay. Was an extract of Adam’s bone marrow implanted in that of a female Primitive Worker’s “clay” through her belly?

 

Regrettably, the Bible does not describe what was done to the female (named Eve by Adam), and the Sumerian texts that have surely dealt with this point have not been found so far. That something of the kind did exist is certain from the fact that the best available translation of the Atra Hasis text into Early Assyrian (about 850 B.C.) contains lines that parallel some of the biblical verses about a man leaving his father’s house and becoming as one with his wife as they lie in bed together. The tablet that carries this text is too damaged, however, to reveal all that the Sumerian original text had to say.


But we do know nowadays, thanks to modern science, that sexuality and the ability to procreate lie in human chromosomes; each person’s cell contains twenty-three pairs—in the case of a woman a pair of X chromosomes and in the case of  men one X and one Y chromosome (Fig. 59).

Figure 59


However, the reproductive cells (female egg, male sperm) each contain only one set of chromosomes, not pairs. The pairing takes place when the egg is fertilized by the sperm; the embryo thus has the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, but only half of them come from the mother and only half from the father. The mother, having two X chromosomes, always contributes an X. The father, having both an X and a Y, may end up contributing either one; if it is an X, the baby will be female; if a Y, it will be a male.


The key to reproduction thus lies in the fusion of the two single sets of chromosomes; if their number and genetic code differ, they will not combine and the beings will not procreate. Since both female and male Primitive Workers already existed, their sterility was not due to the lack of X or Y chromosomes. The need for a bone—the Bible stresses that Eve was “bone of the bones” of Adam—suggests that there was a need to overcome some immunological rejection by the female Primitive Workers of the males’ sperms. The operation carried out by the Elohim overcame this problem.

 

Adam and Eve discovered their sexuality, having acquired “knowing”—a biblical term that connoted sex for the purpose of procreation (“And Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and gave birth to Cain.”). Eve, as the tale of the two of them in the Garden of Eden relates, was thenceforth able to become pregnant by Adam, receiving from the deity a blessing combined with a curse:

“In suffering shall thou bear children.”

With that, “The Adam,” Elohim said, “has become as one of us.”

He was granted “Knowing.”

Homo sapiens was able to procreate and multiply on his own. But though he was given a good measure of the genetic makeup of the Anunnaki, who made Man in their image and after their likeness even in this respect of procreation, one genetic trait was not transmitted. That was the longevity of the Anunnaki. Of the fruit of the “Tree of Life,” partaking of which would have made Man live as long as the Anunnaki, he was not even to taste. This point is clearly spelled out in the Sumerian tale of Adapa, the Perfect Man created by Enki:

Wide understanding he perfected for him. . . .
Wisdom he had given him. . . .
To him he had given Knowing;
Eternal life he had not given him.

Ever since publication of The 12th Planet in 1976, I have spared no effort to explain the seeming “immortality” of the “gods.” Using flies in my home as an example, I have been wont to say that if flies could talk, Papa Fly would tell Son Fly,

“You know, this man here is immortal; as long as I have lived, he has not aged at all; my father told me that his father, all our forefathers as far as we can remember, have seen this man the way he is: ever-living, immortal!”

My “immortality” (in the eyes of the talking flies) is, of course, simply a result of the different life cycles. Man lives so many decades of years; flies count their lives in days. But what are all these terms? A “day” is the time it takes our planet to complete one revolution about its axis; a “year” is the time it takes our planet to complete one orbit around the Sun. The length of time activities by the Anunnaki took on Earth was counted in sars, each one equivalent to 3,600 Earth-years. A sar, I have suggested, was the “year” on Nibiru—the time it took that planet to complete one orbit around the Sun.

 

So when the Sumerian King Lists reported, for example, that one leader of the Anunnaki administered one of their cities for 36,000 years, the text actual states ten sars. if a single generation for Man is twenty years, there would be 180 generations of Man’s progeny in one Anunnaki “year”—making them appear to be Forever Living, “immortal.” The ancient texts make clear that this longevity was not passed on to Man, but intelligence was. This implies a belief or knowledge, in antiquity, that the two traits, intelligence and longevity, could somehow be bestowed upon or denied to Man by those who had genetically created him.

 

Not surprisingly, perhaps, modem science agrees.

“Evidence amassed over the past 60 years suggests that there is a genetic component to intelligence,” Scientific American reported in its March 1989 issue.

Besides giving examples of geniuses in various fields who had bequeathed their talents to children and grandchildren, the article highlighted a report by researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and Pennsylvania State University (David W. Fulker, John C. DeFries, and Robert Plomin), who had established a “close biological correlation” in mental abilities attributable to genetic heredity. Scientific American headlined the article, “More Evidence Links Genes and Intelligence.”

 

Other studies, recognizing that “memories are made of molecules,” have led to the suggestion that if computers are ever to match human intelligence, they ought to be “molecular computers.” Updating suggestions made in this direction by Forrest Carter of the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, D.C., John Hopfield of Caltech and AT&T’s Bell Laboratories outlined in 1988 (Science, vol. 241) a blueprint for a “biological computer.”


Evidence has also been mounting for the genetic source of the life cycles of living organisms. The various stages in the life of insects and the length of time they live are clearly genetically orchestrated. So is the fact that so many creatures—but not mammals—die after reproducing. Octopuses, for example, it was discovered (by Jerome Wodinsky of Brandeis University) are genetically programmed to “self-destruct” after reproduction through chemicals found in their optical glands. The studies were carried out in the course of research on the aging process in animals, not on the life of octopuses per se.

 

Many other studies have shown that some animals possess the capacity to repair damaged genes in their cells and thus halt or reverse the aging process. Every species clearly has a life span fixed by its genes—a single day for the mayfly, about six years for a frog, a limit of about fifteen for a dog. Nowadays the human limit lies somewhere not much beyond one hundred years but in earlier times human life spans were much longer.


According to the Bible, Adam lived to be 930 years old, his son Seth 912 years, and his son Enosh, 905. Although there is reason to believe that the editors of Genesis reduced by a factor of 60 the much greater life spans reported in the Sumerian texts, the Bible does acknowledge that mankind had much longer lifetimes before the Deluge. Patriarchal life spans began to shorten as the millennia raced on. Terah, Abraham’s father, died at the age of 205. Abraham lived 175 years; his son Isaac died at age 180. Isaac’s son Jacob lived to be 147 but Jacob’s son passed away at age 110.


While it is believed the genetic errors that accumulate as DNA keeps reproducing itself in the cells contribute to the aging process, scientific evidence indicates the existence of a biological “clock” in all creatures, a basic, built-in genetic trait that controls the life span of each species. What that gene or group of genes is, what makes it tick, what triggers it to “express” itself, are still matters of intense research. But that the answer lies in the genes has been shown by numerous studies.

 

Some, on viruses, show that they possess fragments of DNA that can literally “immortalize” them. Enki must have known all that, so that when it came to perfecting The Adam—creating a true, procreating Homo sapiens—he gave Adam intelligence and “Knowing,” but not the full longevity that the Anunnaki genes possessed.


As Mankind keeps distancing itself from the days of its creation as a Lulu, a “mixed” being who carried the genetic heritage of both the Earth and the Heavens, the shortening of its average life span might be seen as a symptom of the minute loss, from generation to generation, of what some consider “divine” elements and the increasing preponderance of the “animal which is within us.” The existence in our genetic makeup of what some call “nonsense” DNA—segments of DNA that seem to have lost their purpose—is an apparent leftover from the original “mixing.” The two independent, though connected, parts of the brain—one more primitive and emotional, the other newer and more rational—are another attestation to the mixed genetic origin of Mankind.

 

The evidence that corroborates the ancient tales of creation, massive as it has been so far, does not end with genetic manipulation. There is more to come, and it is all above Eve! Modern anthropology, with the aid of fossil finds by paleontologists and advances in other fields of science, has made great strides in tracing back the origin of Man. By now the question “Where did we come from?” has been clearly answered: Mankind arose in southeastern Africa.


The story of Man, we now know, did not begin with Man; the “chapter” that tells of the group of mammals called “Primates” takes us back some forty-five or fifty million years, when a common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and Man appeared in Africa. Twenty-five or thirty million years later—that is how slowly the wheels of evolution turn—a precursor of the Great Apes branched off the primate line. In the 1920s fossils of this early ape, “Proconsul,” were found by chance on an island in Lake Victoria (see below map), and the find eventually attracted to the area the best-known husband-wife team of paleontologists, Louis S. B. and Mary Leakey. Besides Proconsul fossils they also discovered in the area remains of Ramapithecus, the first erect ape or manlike primate; it was some fourteen million years old—some eight or ten million years up the evolutionary tree from Proconsul.


These discoveries meant more than finding a few fossils; they unlocked the door to nature’s secret laboratory, the hideaway where Mother Nature keeps forging ahead with the evolutionary march that has led from mammal to primate to great apes to hominids. The place was the rift valley that slashes through Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania—part of the rift system that begins in the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea in Israel, includes the Red Sea, and runs all the way to southern Africa (map, Fig. 60).

Figure 60


Numerous fossil finds have been made at sites that the Leakeys and other paleoanthropologists have made famous. The richest finds have been in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; near Lake Rudolf (renamed Lake Turkana) in Kenya; and in the Afar province of Ethiopia, to name the best-known sites.

 

There have been many discoverers from many nations, but some—prominent in the scholarly debates regarding the meaning and time scales of the finds—ought to be mentioned:

  • the Leakeys’ son Richard (curator of the National Museums of Kenya)

  • Donald C. Johanson (curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History at the time of his discoveries)

  • Tim White, and J. Desmond Clark (University of California at Berkeley)

  • Alan Walker (John Hopkins University)

  • Andrew Hill and David Pilbeam of Harvard

  • Raymond Dart and Phillip Tobias of South Africa

Putting aside the problems raised by pride of discovery, different interpretations of finds, and a propensity for splitting species and genuses into smaller subdivisions, it is safe to state that the branch leading to humans separated from that of four-legged apes some fourteen million years ago and that it took another nine million years or so until the first apes with hominid aspects, called Australopithecus, showed up—all where nature had chosen its “man-making” laboratory to be. While the fossil record for those intervening ten million years is almost blank, paleoanthropologists (as the new group of scientists has come to be called) have been quite ingenious in piecing together the record in the ensuing three million years.

 

Sometimes with only a jawbone, a fractured skull, a pelvis bone, the remains of some fingers, or, with luck, even parts of skeletons, they have been able to reconstruct the beings these fossils represented; with the aid of other finds, such as animal bones or stones crudely shaped to serve as tools, they have determined the developmental stage and customs of the beings; and by dating the geologic strata in which the fossils are found, they have been able to date the fossils themselves.

 

Among the outstanding road markers have been such finds as skeletal parts of a female nicknamed “Lucy” (who might have looked like the hominid in Fig. 61)—believed to have been an advanced Australopithecus who lived some 3.5 million years ago; a fossil known by its catalog number as “Skull 1470” of a male from perhaps 2 million years ago and considered by its finders to be a “near man,” or Homo habilis (“Handy Man”)—a term to whose implications many object; and skeletal remains of a “strapping young male” cataloged WT.15000 of a Homo erectus from about 1.5 million years ago, probably the first true hominid.

 

He ushered in the Old Stone Age; he began to use stones as tools, and migrated via the Sinai peninsula, which acts as a land bridge between Africa and Asia, to southeast Asia on the one hand and to southern Europe on the other.

Figure 61
 

The trail of the Homo genus is lost after that; the chapter between about 1.5 million years to about 300,000 years ago is missing, except for traces of Homo erectus on the peripheries of this hominid’s migrations. Then, about 300,000 years ago, without any evidence of gradual change, Homo sapiens made his appearance. At first it was believed that Homo sapiens neanderthalis. Neanderthal man (so named after the site of his first discovery in Germany), who came into prominence in Europe and parts of Asia about 125,000 years ago, was the ancestor of the Cro-Magnons, Homo sapiens sapiens, who took over the lands about 35,000 years ago.

 

Then it was held that the more “brutish” and thus “primitive’” Neanderthal stemmed from a different Homo sapiens branch, that Cro-Magnon had developed somewhere on his own. Now it is known that the latter notion is more correct, but not entirely. Related but not the offspring of each other, the two lines of Homo sapiens lived side by side as far back as 90,000 or even 100,000 years ago.


The evidence was found in two caves, one on Mount Carmel and the other near Nazareth, in Israel; they are among a number of caves in the area where prehistoric man had made himself a home. The first finds in the 1930s were believed to be about 70,000 years old and only of Neanderthal Man, thus fitting well with the theories then held. In the 1960s a joint Israeli-French team reexcavated the cave at Qafzeh, the one near Nazareth, and discovered that the remains were not only of Neanderthals but also of Cro-Magnon types. In fact, the layering indicated that Cro-Magnons had used the cave before the Neanderthals—a fact that pushed back the appearance of the Cro-Magnons from the supposed 35,000 years ago to well before 70,000 years ago.


Themselves incredulous, the scientists at Hebrew University in Jerusalem turned for verification to the remains of rodents found in the same layers. Their examination gave the same incredible date: Cro-Magnons, Homo sapiens sapiens, who were not supposed to have made an appearance before 35,000 years ago, had reached the Near East and settled in what is now Israel more than 70,000 years ago. Moreover, for a long time they shared the area with the Neanderthals.

 

At the end of 1987 the finds at Qafzeh and Kebara, the cave on Mount Carmel, were dated by new methods, including Thermoluminescence, a technique that gives reliable dates much further back than the 40,000 to 50,000 year limit of radiocarbon dating. As reported in two issues (vols. 330 and 340) of Nature by the leader of the French team, Helene Vallades of the National Research Center at Gif sur Yvette, the results showed without doubt that both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons dwelt in the area between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago (scientists now use 92,000 years as the mean date). These findings were confirmed later at another site in the Galilee.

 

Devoting an editorial in Nature to the findings, Christopher Stringer of the British Museum acknowledged that the conventional view that Neanderthals preceded Cro-Magnons had to be discarded. Both lines appeared to stem from an earlier form of Homo sapiens. “Wherever the original ‘Eden' for modern humans might have been,” the editorial stated, it now appeared that for some reason Neanderthals were the first to migrate northward, about 125.000 years ago.

 

Joined by his colleague, Peter Andrews, and Ofer Bar-Yosef of Hebrew University and Harvard, they forcefully argued for an “Out of Africa” interpretation of these finds. A northward migration by these first Homo sapiens from an African birthplace was confirmed by the discovery (by Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University, Dallas) of a Neanderthal skull near the Nile in Egypt that was 80,000 years old.


“Does it all mean an earlier dawn for humans’?” a Science headline asked.

 

As scientists from other disciplines joined the search, it became clear the answer was yes. The Neanderthals, it was determined, were not just visitors to the Near East but long-time dwellers there. And they were not the primitive brutes that earlier notions had made them out to be. They buried their dead in rituals that indicated religious practices and “at least one type of spiritually motivated behavior that allies them with modern humans” (Jared M. Diamond of the University of California Medical School at Los Angeles).

 

Some, as the discoverer of Neanderthal remains at the Shanidar cave, Ralph S. Solecki of Columbia University, believe that the Neanderthals knew how to use herbs for healing—60,000 years ago. Skeletal finds in the Israeli caves convinced anatomists that, contrary to previously held theories. Neanderthals could speak:

“Fossil brain casts show a well-developed language area,” stated Dean Falk of the State University of New York at Albany.

 

And “Neanderthal’s brain was bigger than ours . . . he was not dull-witted and inarticulate,” concluded neuroanatomist Terrence Deacon of Harvard.

All these recent discoveries have left no doubt that Neanderthal man was without doubt a Homo sapiens—not an ancestor of Cro-Magnon man but an earlier type from the same human stock.


In March 1987 Christopher Stringer of the British Museum, along with a colleague, Paul Mellars, organized a conference at Cambridge University to update and digest the new findings concerning “The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Man.” As reported by J. A. J. Gowlett in Antiquity (July 1987), the conferees first considered the fossil evidence. They concluded that after a hiatus of 1.2 to 1.5 million years by Homo erectus. Homo sapiens made a sudden appearance soon after 300,000 years ago (as evidenced by fossil remains in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa). Neanderthals “differentiated” from those early Homo sapiens (“Wise man”) about 230,000 years ago and may have begun their northward migrations 100,000 years later, perhaps coinciding with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens.


The conference also examined other lines of evidence, including the brand-new data provided by the field of biochemistry. Most exciting were the findings based on genetics. The ability of geneticists to trace parentage through comparisons of DNA “sentences” has been proven in paternity lawsuits. It was inevitable that the new techniques would be extended to trace not only child-parent relationships but also whole lineages of species.

 

It was this new science of molecular genetics that enabled Allan C. Wilson and Vincent M. Sarich (both of the University of California at Berkeley) to establish with great accuracy that hominids differentiated from apes about 5 million, not 15 million years ago, and that the hominids’ closest “next of kin” were chimpanzees and not gorillas. Because a person’s DNA keeps getting mixed by the genes of the generational fathers, comparisons of the DNA in the nucleus of the cell (which come half from mother, half from father) do not work well after several generations.

 

It was discovered, however, that in addition to the DNA in the cell’s nucleus, some DNA exists in the mother’s cell but outside the nucleus in bodies called “mitochondria” (Fig. 62). This DNA does not get mixed with the father’s DNA; instead, it is passed on “unadulterated” from mother to daughter to granddaughter, and so on through the generations. This discovery, by Douglas Wallace of Emory University in the 1980s, led him to compare this “mtDNA” of about 800 women.

 

The surprising conclusion, which he announced at a scientific conference in July 1986, was that the mtDNA in all of them appeared to be so similar that these women must have all descended from a single female ancestor.

Figure 62


The research was picked up by Wesley Brown of the University of Michigan, who suggested that by determining the rate of natural mutation of mtDNA, the length of time that had passed since this common ancestor was alive could be calculated. Comparing the mtDNA of twenty-one women from diverse geographical and racial backgrounds, he came to the conclusion that they owed their origin to “a single mitochondrial Eve” who had lived in Africa between 300,000 and 180,000 years ago.
These intriguing findings were taken up by others, who set out to search for “Eve.” Prominent among them was Rebecca Cann of the University of California at Berkeley (later at Hawaii University).

 

Obtaining the placentas of 147 women of different races and geographical backgrounds who gave birth at San Francisco hospitals, she extracted and compared their mtDNA. The conclusion was that they all had a common female ancestor who had lived between 300,000 and 150,000 years (depending on whether the rate of mutation was 2 percent or 4 percent per million years). “We usually assume 250,000 years,” Cann stated.


The upper limit of 300,000 years, palcoanthropologists noted, coincided with the fossil evidence for the time Homo sapiens made his appearance.

“What could have happened 300,000 years ago to bring this change about?” Cann and Allan Wilson asked, but they had no answer.

To further test what has come to be called the “Eve Hypothesis,” Cann and her colleagues, Wilson and Mark Stoneking, proceeded to examine placentas of about 150 women in America whose ancestors came from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as placentas from aborigine women in Australia and New Guinea. The results indicated that the African mtDNA was the oldest and that all those different women from various races and the most diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds had the same sole female ancestor who had lived in Africa between 290,000 and 140,000 years ago.
 

In an editorial in Science (September 11,1987) in which all these findings were reviewed, it was stated that the overwhelming evidence showed that,

“Africa was the cradle of modem humans... The story molecular biology seems to be telling is that modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago.”

These sensational findings—since then corroborated by other studies—made worldwide headlines.

  • “The question Where did we come from? has been answered” the National Geographic (October, 1988) announced: out of southeastern Africa.

  • “The Mother of Us All” has been found, headlined the San Francisco Chronicle.

  • “Out of Africa: Man’s Route to Rule the World,” announced the London Observer.

  • Newsweek (January 11, 1988) in what was to be its best-selling issue ever depicted an “Adam” and an “Eve” with a serpent on its front cover, headlining it “The Search for Adam and Eve.”

The headline was appropriate, for as Allan Wilson observed, “Obviously where there was a mother there had to be a father.” All these very recent discoveries go a long way indeed in confirming the biblical claim regarding the first couple of Homo sapiens:

And Adam called his wife’s name Chava
[”She of Life”—“Eve” in English]
for she was the mother of all who live.

Several conclusions are offered by the Sumerian data.

  • First, the creation of the Lulu was the result of the mutiny of the Anunnaki about 300,000 years ago. This date as the upper limit for the first appearance of Homo sapiens has been corroborated by modem science.

  • Second, the forming of the Lulu had taken place “above the Abzu,” north of the mining area. This is corroborated by the location of the earliest human remains in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia—north of the gold-mining areas of southern Africa.

  • Third, the full emergence of the first type of Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals—about 230,000 years ago—falls well within the 250.000 years suggested by the mtDNA findings for the data of “Eve,” followed later by the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, “modern Man.”

There is no contradiction at all between these later dates and the 300,000-year date of the mutiny. Bearing in mind that these were Earth-years, whereas for the Anunnaki 3,600 Earthyears amounted to only one of theirs, we should first recall that a period of trial and error followed the decision to "create the Adam,” until the “perfect model” was achieved. Then, even after the Primitive Workers were brought forth, seven males and seven females at a time, pregnancies by Birth Goddesses were required, as the new hybrid was unable to procreate.

 

Clearly, the tracing of mtDNA accounts for the ”Eve” who could bear children, not a female Lulu unable to procreate. The granting to mankind of this ability, it was shown earlier, took place as a result of a second genetic manipulation by Enki and Ninti which, in the Bible, is reflected in the story of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Did that second genetic manipulation take place about 250,000 years ago, the data for “Eve” suggested by Rebecca Cann, or 200,000 years ago, as the article in Science prefers?

 

According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve began to have children only after their expulsion from “Eden.” We know nothing of whether Abel, their second son who was killed by his elder brother Cain, had any offspring. But we do read that Cain and his descendants were ordered to migrate to faraway lands. Were these descendants of the “accursed line of Cain” the migrating Neanderthals? It is an intriguing possibility that must remain a speculation.


What seems certain is that the Bible does recognize the final emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, modern human beings. It tells us that the third son of Adam and Eve, Seth, had a son named Enosh, of whom the lineage of Mankind is descended. Now, Enosh in Hebrew means “human, human being”—you and me. It was in the time of Enosh, the Bible states, that “men began to call the name of Yahweh." It was then, in other words, that fully civilized Man and religious worship were established.


With that, all the aspects of the ancient tale stand corroborated.

 


THE EMBLEM OF ENTWINED SERPENTS

 

In the biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the antagonist of the Lord God who had caused them to acquire “knowing” (the ability to procreate) was the Serpent, Nahash in Hebrew.


The term has two other meanings: “he who knows secrets” and “he who knows copper.” These other meanings or word plays are found in the Sumerian epithet BUZUR for Enki, which meant “he who solves secrets” and “he of the metal mines.” I have therefore suggested in previous writings that, in the original Sumerian version, the “Serpent” was Enki.

 

His emblem was entwined serpents; it was the symbol of his “cult center” Eridu,

(a), of his African domains in general

(b), and of the pyramids in particular

(c); and it appeared on Sumerian illustrations on cylinder seals of the events described in the Bible.

What did the emblem of entwined serpents—the symbol for medicine and healing to this very day—represent? The discovery by modern science of the double-helix structure of DNA (see Fig. 49) offers the answer: the Entwined Serpents emulated the structure of the genetic code, the secret knowledge of which enabled Enki to create The Adam and then grant Adam and Eve the ability to procreate.

 

The emblem of Enki as a sign of healing was invoked by Moses when he made a nahash nehosheth—a “copper serpent”—to halt an epidemic afflicting the Israelites. Was the involvement of copper in the triple meanings of the term and in the making of the copper serpent by Moses due to some unknown role of copper in genetics and healing? Recent experiments, conducted at the universities of Minnesota and St. Louis, suggest that it is indeed so.

 

They showed that radionucleide copper-62 is a “positron-emitter,” valuable in imaging blood flow, and that other copper compounds can carry Pharmaceuticals to living cells, including brain cells.

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