Who Were the People Cain Met?

The companion page to this one, Cain and the Cainites, argues that Genesis 4 shows Cain banished into a world already full of people: he fears strangers, marries, and builds a city, all without a word about brothers or sisters who could explain any of it. This page takes up the question that argument leaves open, and it might be the weightiest of them: who were those people?

The answer of A Timeline of Origins can be put in one sentence: every person Cain met was a human being in God’s image, just as you and I are, though the story of how they came to be so is not what you might expect. The question deserves care. An account of human origins can, in theoretical terms, imply that some peoples came late to full humanity, or missed some endowment essential to it, without anyone intending or writing any such thing. The account below is built so that it implies nothing of the kind about anyone.

A human body, and something more

“Human” can mean two things, and the arguments of this page need to treat them separately: just as Jesus speaks of the human body and the human soul as distinct things (Matthew 10:28), so this page speaks of a humanity of the body and a humanity of the whole person. A Timeline of Origins gives each a name. The biological human is the anatomically modern human: a member of the species Homo sapiens, with a body like ours, the being a fossil can attest. The theological human is a being with everything required to be in God’s image, and that, the book holds, includes something no fossil can attest: a human soul, the inward life of a person that continues when the body dies. This page will mostly say a human in God’s image. Today, every biological human is also a theological human, in God’s image; the proposal of this page is that, in our world, it was not always so.

We propose that, for long ages before the time of Adam, the earth was already inhabited by beings with fully human bodies. The sciences trace such bodies deep into the past: the ancestors of Australia’s first peoples arrived some 65,000 years ago, and the painted caves of Europe are some 35,000 years old. What no excavation can show is when those bodies were joined by human souls. The book is blunt about how little the ground can tell us here: of all the traces a people can leave, it treats only written language as compelling evidence of humans in God’s image. And written language in the full sense, marks that record speech rather than picture the world, appears only after 4000 BC; there were pictograms earlier, but pictograms shaded into true writing only by degrees.

Two worlds, and two streams of humanity

Where, then, was Adam? Here A Timeline of Origins makes its most distinctive proposal: he did not live in our world at all. The labels for the two worlds are taken from Peter. In 2 Peter 3:5–7 he distinguishes “the world of that time”, which the flood “deluged and destroyed”, from “the present heavens and earth”, which are still standing; in 2 Peter 2:5 he calls that flooded world “the ancient world”, the label this site now mostly uses. The proposal takes the distinction physically, as two different worlds. Adam and Eve were specially created in that other world, around 5100 BC, and the long-lived patriarchs, Adam through Noah, lived there. The people of our world, meanwhile, had arrived along the path the sciences describe. So humanity, on this proposal, came into being by a dual mechanism: one stream specially created by God, beginning with Adam; a far larger stream that evolved, filling our earth; and, in time, the blending of the two. (Joshua Swamidass has argued on similar lines that a recent, specially created Adam and Eve sit comfortably with the genetic evidence; the book’s account differs mainly in where it puts the garden.) The blending began with Cain himself: his banishment was, on this account, a crossing between worlds, and he arrived in ours around 5000 BC, bringing with him the language of the world he left, Sumerian.

What the difference would have shown

We propose that the difference would have shown, and that it would have shown, at least in this regard: a human, made in God’s image, can express a promise that binds them. The proposal is drawn from the covenant of marriage implied in Genesis 2, which the text presents as the first thing two humans in God’s image do together. A promise is a remarkable power. With a word, a person takes hold of their own future and gives part of it away, and stays answerable for it long after the moment has passed. A being unable to do this would not have carried one tidy gap and nothing more. The capacities a promise draws on run through the whole of life: grasping what is said, meaning it, holding to it across time. Where those capacities were missing, beings not made in God’s image would have struck a human in God’s image as slow, limited in what they could say, follow, and undertake. No one, in fact, was ever there to make the assessment: before the gift this page goes on to describe, the only humans in God’s image were the two in the garden. But had such an observer stood among those beings, the difference would have been plain, and it matters that it would. This page makes no claim about how much of the moral world animals share; perhaps more than we know. But Scripture grounds one stark difference in the image of God: to take a human life is murder in a way that killing an animal is not, and a duty that particular requires that humans be recognisable as such. To live the moral life, one must be able to tell the neighbour to whom it is owed.

And yet the absence of a soul is not the absence of every ability, and the book is willing to credit the biological humans of the ages before Adam with a great deal. Neanderthals, whom the scientific mainstream does not count as human in our full sense, hafted stone points to wooden handles, cut geometric patterns into bone and stone, and seem to have buried their dead, perhaps with ritual. If all that lay within a Neanderthal’s reach, then words, tools, trade, art, burial and grief plausibly lay within reach of the biological humans who lived before the gift God would bestow around the time of Adam’s sin, and nothing in Scripture or plain reason rules it out. Some things, though, the book does hold to belong only to humans in God’s image, and marriage is its clearest example: a covenant implied in Genesis 2, though not named until Malachi speaks of “the wife of your marriage covenant” (Malachi 2:14). The assumption here is that every marriage has a covenant inherent to it, and we presume one that needs stating aloud. But a spoken covenant leaves no trace in the ground, which is why, among the things archaeology can recover, the book leans on written language alone.

One gift, given to everyone at once

When, and how, did God bestow his image on beings who until then had human bodies alone? The book’s answer is a single miracle of global reach. At the time of Adam’s sin, around 5100 BC, God supplied what was lacking to every being with a human body then alive in our world, in one instant, wherever on earth they stood. He did not create each soul from nothing: the soul he used as model and source was Adam’s, and Adam’s after the fall, with fallen Eve’s, perhaps, as the like source for the souls of women. In one moment, our world became a world of humans in God’s image; in the same moment, a world of the fallen.

The thought has respectable company. Commenting on Genesis in 1967, Derek Kidner allowed that, after the special creation of Eve, God “may have now conferred His image on Adam’s collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being”, so that Adam’s headship extended “outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring”. A Timeline of Origins gives Kidner’s possibility a time, a mechanism, and a global extent.

Why model the gift on a fallen soul rather than a perfect one? Because Scripture speaks of what we all inherited. Paul writes that “in Adam all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22): on the book’s account, what came to every person in that moment was the dignity of God’s image and, bound up with it, the guilt and mortality of the man the soul was modelled on. That is the sober half of the gift. The same verse carries the other half: “in Christ all will be made alive”. The gift that made the whole world human is the very thing the gospel comes to heal.

Why then? A God’s-eye question

The date is not arbitrary. The book poses a question from a God’s-eye point of view: if God intended one species, clearly marked out from every other, to bear his image, with the distinct responsibilities, dignity and value that come with it, when would be the best time to bring that species into its full flower? Around 5100 BC answers the question three times over. It is after every other species of the genus Homo was extinct, so there was never a being, a Neanderthal cousin, say, of whom “human or not?” had no clean answer. It is after Homo sapiens had already spread to every continent, so the gift, falling on everyone at once, could not miss a single people, however early their ancestors set out; those whose forebears reached Australia 65,000 years ago received it in the same instant as everyone else. And it is before writing, the one certain trace of full humanity, appears in the record, so nothing yet dug up contradicts it.

A proposal that devalues no one

Why propose one global gift, given in an instant, rather than a gradual dawning of the image across the species? Here is a key motive for that proposal. A gradual story, in which the image of God seeps into a species slowly and unevenly, cannot avoid a ragged edge: generations in which some beings are humans in God’s image, to be loved as such, and others, outwardly identical, are not, and no one can say which is which. Interbreeding, murder, theft, marriage itself all become morally unreadable. The book judges that God would not have built such a fog into the moral world, and its timeline never generates one. There was never a borderline generation, never a household half in and half out, never a person whose mother was in God’s image and whose uncle was not. When Cain crossed into our world, a century or so after the gift, the question “who is human?” had exactly one answer: everyone. The wife he found was his equal in the fullest sense, and theirs, the first marriage of the two streams, was a marriage of equals.

The claim, and its limits

All of this is offered as what it is: a hypothesis, and the book never pretends otherwise. That God worked in just this way cannot be proven, and the timing and the mechanism are proposals, not dogma. What the proposal aims for is coherence with the Scriptures first of all, and secondarily with the findings of mainstream science. It lets Genesis 4 mean what it plainly says, Cain among real strangers east of Eden. And it protects the conviction on which everything else on this page stands: that every human being, without exception, bears the image of God. The people Cain met were fully human, in God’s image; so were all he could have met; and so is every one of their children to this day.

Developed from the distinction between biological and theological humanity in chapters 1 and 3 of A Timeline of Origins (Michael D. Russell, 2024), engaging Wayne Grudem in Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (Crossway, 2017) and Derek Kidner, Genesis (Tyndale, 1967).

Common questions

Who was Cain’s wife?

One of the people of our world, not a daughter of Adam and Eve. Genesis 4 never mentions a sister, and Cain’s fear that “whoever finds me will kill me” assumes a populated world. On this site’s account, Cain crossed into our world around 5000 BC and married among people who had received God’s image a century or so earlier. He came from the world of the garden, where lives ran past nine hundred years; she was born in ours, where they do not.

What was the mark of Cain?

Genesis withholds what the mark was and gives only its purpose: “so that no one who found him would kill him” (Genesis 4:15). With Abel dead and Seth unborn, the only people related to Cain were his parents; a protective mark makes sense only if the world Cain was entering held strangers, real enough and dangerous enough to need warding off.

Were there humans before Adam and Eve?

It depends on which sense of “human” you mean. Beings with fully human bodies, yes: they had lived in our world for tens of thousands of years before Adam. Humans in God’s image, no: on this site’s proposal the image was bestowed around 5100 BC, at the time of Adam’s sin, when God gave a soul, in a single moment, to every being with a human body then alive. So by the time Cain crossed into our world, everyone he could meet, marry, or fear was a human in God’s image, as every person has been since.

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