My daughter in law and I were having an intellectual exercise in origin stories and religion. She's very level-headed and fascinated with mythologies and history and theories and such so I am glad I can freely talk with her without offenses being taken.
I was telling her different ideas I have heard from Catholics including one where Adam and Eve were selected from hominoids and started the human race (as opposed to Creationists who believe Adam was literally formed from mud and Eve from his rib, which could be interpreted rather as Adam was taken from creation, instead of from, say, the angels, and Eve was the same developed species as him, instead of maybe a different kind of hominoid).
So, that made me wonder about the early history laws against beastiality and the emphasis on only taking spouses from your own people. What if it wasn't about men having sex with their sheep and goats, but rather with the lesser hominoids, who, despite being our closest evolutionary ancestors and maybe even reproductively compatible, were animals/beasts as opposed to fully souled/spirited humans in God's image.
Perhaps the flood wiped out the original mixing of humans and hominoids, if you believe in a global flood instead of a local one, but Noah would have likely saved some of the hominoids, but perhaps the lineage of the chimps and apes we see today instead of the more human-like ones. And thus our evolutionary ancestors are bones and fossils for us to speculate on.
I would love more intellectual takes on this. Feel free to share your thoughts, information to the contrary, etc.
