Pre-Adamite

The Pre-Adamite hypothesis or Pre-adamism is the belief that humans (or intelligent but non-human creatures) existed before the biblical character Adam. This assumption is contrary to beliefs which describe Adam as the first human, as suggested in passages of the Bible and in some interpretations of the Qur'an. Pre-adamism is therefore distinct from the conventional Abrahamic belief that Adam was the first human. Advocates of this hypothesis are known as "pre-Adamites", along with the humans who they believe existed before Adam. Pre-adamism has a long history, probably originating in early pagan responses to Abrahamic claims regarding the origins of the human race.

The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between Theophilus of Antioch and an Egyptian pagan "Apollonius the Egyptian" (probably Apollonius Dyscolus), who argued that the world was 153,075 years old.

The most serious early challenge to biblical Adamism came from the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate who, upon his rejection of Christianity and his conversion to Theurgy, a late form of Neoplatonism, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed Coadamism or multiple-adamism.

St. Augustine’s book The City of God contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is titled "Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years", while the title of book XVIII, chapter 40 is "The Egyptians’ abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years". The titles indicate that Augustine saw pagan ideas concerning both the history of the world and the chronology of the human race as incompatible with the Genesis creation narrative. Augustine’s position on this matter was supported by most rabbis and also by the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as myths and fables not requiring any considered refutation.

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