資料提供：明鏡臺

Source: Newsweek 111 (Jan. 11, 1988): 46-52. :The Search for Adam and Eve

When scientists announced their "discovery" of Eve last year, they rekindled perhaps the oldest human debate: where did we come from? They also, in some sense, confirmed a belief that existed long before the Bible. Versions of the Adam-and-Eve story date back at least 5,000 years and have been told in cultures from the Mediterranean to the South Pacific to the Americas. The mythmakers spun their tales on the same basic assumption as the scientists: that at some point we all share an ancestor. The scientists don't claim to have found the first woman, merely a common ancestor -- possibly one from the time when modern humans arose.

What's startling about this Eve is that she lived 200,000 years ago. This date not only upsets fundamentalists (the Bible's Eve was calculated to have lived 5,992 years ago), it challenges many evolutionists' conviction that the human family tree began much earlier.

Newsweek, The Search for Adam and Eve (1998)