Publisher's Synopsis
From the earliest days as thinking humans we have had many questions about life. We have had fewer acceptable answers. This is beginning to change as we are learning more and more about life and how it developed. I grew up in the Bible Belt of Mississippi. We were taught that God created all life and then He created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But then I read about ancient fossils of human-like creatures and started learning about evolution. So what is the truth? Am I to continue to believe the literal words of the Bible or the findings of archaeology and the related scientific evidence? I had to find the truth so I started my search. Let's explore what I learned. As we walk about Earth and look around we learn that there are about ten million species of animals and several hundred thousand species of plants, but all the lives that we see are latecomers on planet Earth. And even the fossils of old that we find, when added to the life forms of today, make up only a small fraction of species that have lived on planet Earth. To understand the first life on earth and the first man on earth, we need to explore what life really is, how it got started, and how we came to be. Earth's life forms vary in complexity from one-cell creatures such as amoeba to the most complex, which is man. All life on planet earth is designed and operated by its DNA, which is a very large molecule in the nucleus of each cell. The DNA caries codes that perform 3 functions: 1)Build the proteins that structure our bodies 2)Operate switches that turn the protein-making genes off and on 3)Operate the "command center" that activates the switches I quickly learned that life is DNA. The Bible taught me that God created all life on earth. He then created Adam and Eve as the first humans. But science has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have very high percentages of the same DNA as other animals. We even have 50% of the same DNA as a banana! We are definitely related to lower life forms. We only have to follow the DNA to understand our origins. The Y chromosome of men is passed down identically from father to son. The DNA from the mitochondria in women is passed down identically from mother to daughter. This allows us to trace our own DNA all the way back to Adam and Eve! A very large number of studies and tests have been conducted to date the original human parents of those of us living today. Adam and Eve most likely lived 228,000 years ago. Read this book to see what I have learned. You may want to follow your own DNA back to Adam and Eve.
