If you believe God created the first humans as described in the Bible, you believe that humans were created somewhere in southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq) where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea.

It is possible to estimate the date of that event using the family tree from Adam to Abraham which is described in the Bible. Although the Bible narrative leaves some minor gaps, the consensus among people who have run the numbers is Adam was created approximately 6,000 years ago--4,000 BCE.

After their creation, humans went forth and multiplied and spread through the world. Of course, there was one little interruption. Some 1,650 years after creating Adam, God killed (almost) everyone in a gigantic worldwide flood. So humans were forced to start populating the world afresh 4,350 years ago.

If the Bible is to be believed, humans did astonishingly well. In that very short time, they migrated from the Middle East to Siberia, Australia, North and South America, the whole of Europe, Asia and Africa. Along the way, they evolved into four major racial groups; Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid. And they bred like rabbits, reaching a population of almost 8 billion in that short time.

There is another way to think about this. We could look for evidence and see what that tells us. For example, there is evidence that the city of Jericho in the Palestine territories has been a settlement for 11,000 years--that's 5,000 years before God created humans. Perhaps it was originally occupied by hamsters?

There is overwhelming evidence that modern humans evolved in East Africa, in or close to modern-day Kenya, around 220,000 years ago and spread across Africa and then to other continents. Using a combination of dating techniques and genetic analysis, we are arriving at a scientific consensus that humans migrated from Africa in a timeline something like this:

Humans reached:

The Middle East - 100,000 years ago.

India - 70,000 years ago.

Southern East-Asia 60,000 years ago.

Indonesia - 55,000 years ago.

Siberia - 45,000 years ago.

Southern Europe - 45,000 years ago.

North America - 20,000 years ago.

So, what did the Bible get wrong? The location, the date and the process were all terribly wrong. It could hardly have been more wrong if the Bible authors had made the whole thing up.

Which, of course, they did.

This article was written by Bill Flavell and originally appeared here