Do you think that there were many Adam and Eves, as opposed to just one pair?

O.K. kids, it's Sunday and time to go to Sunday school again:

Allan:

Do you think that there were many Adam and Eves, as opposed to just one pair?

First of all if you’re referring to the biblical Adam and Eve you’re not smart enough to be asking this question……. but let’s say you want an ancestor that is common to all of us and then we get into the actual “Adam and Eve!”

From Wikipedia:

In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all currently living humans, i.e., the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers, and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman. 

In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 150,000 years ago, consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent Out-of-Africa dispersal.

The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineally descended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.)

The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to biblical Eve. This led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".

However, from my book An Exploration of Religion and the Meaning of Life!: Mr. Allan Wilhem Janssen: 9781537597690: Amazon.com: Books” the very first couple we can pin down by name is THIS guy: 

When the ancestors of humanity made their first tentative journeys from the treetops of Africa down to the Savannah at their doorstep, it was a step that made any other human endeavour, before or since, insignificant by comparison.

It was the first and original “giant step for mankind.”

Let’s call the leader of this group Urk! (NOTE: There is some historical evidence to suggest they were called Fred and Wilma......... but this was never proven!)

The current thinking is that food was more plentiful on the Savannah than in the forest, and that is what brought them out into the open.

Things got to the point where Urk and his “tribe” started living on the plains full time to make a better life for themselves, and since then our ancestors have lived as one of the great number of species of animals on the African Savannah.

From here the human story is told in broad sweeps. Coming out of the ancestral forest, where game was scarce at best, to the abundance of herd and grazing animals on the wide plains, men found a whole new world open to them.

During this time, we, in our humble way, were part of the endless procession of herds and flocks that waited their turn at the watering hole in times of thirst. We came to drink, and occasionally bolted in panic at the approach of lions or other predators. (We spent countless millennia foraging the savannas as one among the many, while modern humans have only spent only a few thousand years getting to know the ropes of civilization.)

Our ancestors of some two to three million years ago were small, hairy, ape-like creatures. (Less than human, but certainly more than their simian cousins.)

They used sticks for digging, and clubs for protection, as they walked upright through the tall grass of the African plains. (Not only were the clubs defensive protection, since many carnivores considered hominids a tasty lunch, but they were also used as offensive weapons to supplement their diet of plants and berries with a growing taste for meat.)

Although small in numbers at first, people spread out and developed to the point where they ranged over large portions of Africa. (The cooperation that was necessary for big game hunting put extreme evolutionary pressures on the wandering tribes. As they became bolder and more resourceful, men started to compete with other Savannah predators.)

This change to hunting larger animals no doubt had an effect on what was also taking place in our development as a species.

This major evolutionary jump was an expansion of the human brain due to a more intricate cooperation among the hunters.

There was a need to grow larger brains that were capable of the organizational and rudimentary linguistic tasks required for systematic hunting. From there humanity changed from just “being dinner” to hunters who went out and “got dinner!”

With the shift to hunting larger animals, a new level of cooperation was also required between the males actually on the hunt and the non-hunters back at home base. They had to develop ways to work together.

This meant a need to communicate more readily, and even more importantly to temper their tendency to behave in self-serving ways.

This necessitated a need to develop a framework of social rules and skills. Quite simply the birth of what made us human: Culture!

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Humans began to slowly dominate their environment several hundred thousand years ago (Urk?) and since then our evolution has been developing at an ever-increasing rate. (This included the high point of the hunter-gatherer communities, the mass killing of herd animals on a many band or tribal basis.)
Since then, the mass hunt gradually declined as an activity essential to the community about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture.

This, and the invention of writing about five thousand years later, may be taken as the official end to pre-history. (This last part of our long journey from pre-humans to modern man also includes the oldest traces of religion and art.)

Thus Man the philosopher was born.

The way I see it anyway!