Pre-Adamite

Early development

The Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, after rejecting Christianity, accepted co-Adamism, the belief in multiple original pairs of people. Augustine of Hippo's The City of God includes chapters indicating a Christian–pagan debate over human origins, with titles such as 'Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years' and 'The Egyptians' abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years. Augustine saw pagan ideas about world history and human chronology as incompatible with Genesis, aligning with most rabbis and church fathers who dismissed such views as myths. He argued that everything was created simultaneously by God, not in seven literal days, and focused on refuting the idea of humanity's eternal existence rather than a Bible-based chronology.

900–1700

In early Islam, a common belief held that humankind is the successor of other intelligent creatures such as jinn and hinn, with jinn often depicted as pre-Adamites. The idea that other humans lived before the known Adam was controversial, though from the mid-ninth century onward the notion of several Adams, each presiding over an era of about 50,000 years, appeared and was regarded as heretical but widely accepted by Ismailis and some Sufis. The book Nabatean Agriculture, written or translated by Ibn Wahshiyya in 904, collated texts defending Babylonian culture against Islam and discussed people living before Adam, that Adam had parents, and that he came from India, proposing Adam as the father of an agricultural civilization rather than all humanity.

The Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi wrote Kitab al Khazari between 1130 and 1140, featuring a discussion where the King of the Khazars questioned a Jewish rabbi, a Christian, and a Muslim about the true religion, raising the challenge that people in India claimed buildings and antiquities millions of years old. The rabbi dismissed these claims, saying Indians lacked a fixed religion or a reliable book, and later Halevi rejected Nabatean claims as those people did not know scriptural revelation.

Halevi maintained Adam was the first human in this world but left open the possibility of an eternal matter and many worlds prior to this one, without impairing belief that this world was created at a certain epoch with Adam and Noah as the first human beings.

Age of Enlightenment

Pre-Adamism gained traction during the Enlightenment as a way to dispute the biblical story of human beginnings. By the 1800s, it found favor among those promoting white racial supremacy. This led to racist readings of early Genesis, such as the claim that Cain either abandoned his family to join a lesser, nonwhite Mongol tribe or married a woman from a supposedly inferior pre-Adamic race.

1800–present

In 19th-century Europe, pre-Adamism attracted those intent on demonstrating the inferiority of non-Western peoples, and in the United States it appealed to those attuned to racial theories who found a common history with non-whites unattractive. Scientists such as Charles Caldwell, Josiah C. Nott, and Samuel G. Morton rejected the view that non-whites were descendants of Adam, with Morton combining pre-Adamism with cranial measurements. In 1860, Isabella Duncan wrote Pre-Adamite Man, Or, The Story of Our Old Planet and Its Inhabitants, Told by Scripture & Science, a popular mixture of geology and scriptural interpretation suggesting pre-Adamites are today's angels, sinless until Adam's disobedience, and possibly raptured into heaven.

She believed some angels sinned and fell, becoming demons, and that such upheaval left geological scars, with ice ages providing evidence of a line between the pre-Adamic era and the modern one beginning about 6,000 years ago. In 1867, Buckner H. Payne, writing as Ariel, published The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status?, insisting all Noah's sons were white and that non-white people were pre-Adamic humans of the field, a separate species without immortal souls preserved on Noah's Ark.