We all know the story: a couple (naked) in a beautiful garden, surrounded by peaceful animals and only themselves to please–an idyllic existence. Enter a talking snake, the offer of forbidden fruit–desire, capitulation, condemnation and then… expulsion from the garden. This is the well-known narrative.

But it has become more difficult to sustain the traditional view that Adam was the first human when confronted with the overwhelming evidence that modern humans began to appear in Africa about 200,000 years ago–and began migrating to the rest of the world 70,000 years ago. One of the major reasons for the decline in people adhering to the Christian faith is the churches’ failure to acknowledge and resolve this intellectual conflict.

In Adam: The first human? Tom Croucher applies a forensic-like focus to interpreting the first five chapters of the Bible. By careful, logical deduction and detailed, historical analysis, Adam is lifted out of the mists of pre-history and placed squarely within the context of a known period of human history–the early, literate period of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia.

Written for believers and sceptics alike, Adam: The first human? reads like a ‘whodunit’, unravelling the apparently contradictory evidence to reveal a consistent, plausible narrative that makes sense of all that we currently know, including the biblical narrative.