Mr. Barkun writes: "Since the account in Genesis mentions Cain taking a wife and building a city, from what stock did Cain's wife come, and who were the inhabitants of Cain's city? Postulating a concept known as "Pre-Adamites" appears to solve this problem. This line of thinking permeated the Enlightenment among deists, all the way down to Voltaire. By the eighteenth century, the body of writing that challenged the traditional account of human origins was sufficiently large that one can discern separate "monogenetic" and "polygenetic" accounts, the former continuing to trace human origins back to Adam, the latter arguing for ...
