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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 129
No other primate — indeed, no other hominin — had ever achieved this speed
or scale of expansion. Neanderthals, despite surviving in Europe for hundreds
of millennia, never expanded beyond Eurasia. Homo erectus spread widely but
without symbolic culture. Only Homo sapiens, after 70 ka, achieved a planetary
dispersal.
In the framework adopted here, this population-level crunch sits downstream
of two earlier waypoints: first, the Y-chromosome MRCA (~254 ka),
understood as the selection of a ready paternal lineage—a genomic substrate
rather than the first true human; and second, Adamic descent (~100 ka), when
that refined vessel was endowed with rūḥ and ʿilm, inaugurating the cognition-
first ignition. Over the ensuing millennia, Adam’s progeny and their symbolic
toolkit diffused through marriage, alliance, and teaching. By ~70 ka, the global
population crossed a critical-mass threshold (effective N ≈ 10,000) at which
innovations persist rather than blink out, aligning with the subsequent
archaeological surge in dispersal, standardized ornaments, and long-distance
exchange.
Figure 12.1 — Global Migration Timeline (70–15 ka)
This timeline plots major dispersals: Africa (~70 ka), Arabia (~60 ka), Australia (~65–
50 ka), Europe (~45 ka), Siberia (~40 ka), and the Americas (~15 ka). The
visualization makes plain the astonishing rapidity of the expansion — an entire planet
settled in less than 50,000 years.