Gen 1:26 An aside about Adam

In my discussion about creation I didn't really talk about the pinnacle of creation which is Adam and Eve. I think I'd have to put a stake in the ground in the person of Adam as he is
spoken of as a real person Luke 3:38, 1 Cor 15:22, 54 and appears in biblical chronologies. In terms of creation / evolution thing I like what John Stott says:

My own position is to accept the historicity of Adam and Eve, but to remain agnostic about some of the details of the story like the precise nature of the tree of life and of the serpent. This is not to be arbitrary or inconsistent, however, for I have biblical reasons for both. That Adam and Eve were literal people seems clear from Romans 5:12-21, where Paul draws a deliberate contrast between the disobedience of Adam through which sin and death entered the world and the obedience of Christ who secured salvation and life. The analogy would be meaningless if Adam’s act of disobedience were not an event as historical as Christ’s act of obedience. But for the serpent and the tree of life, they both reappear in the book of Revelation, where they are clearly symbolical, the serpent representing Satan and the tree eternal life…….My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic ‘hominid’ seem to have existed for thousands of years previously… you may call them Homo erectus…you may even call some of them Homo sapiens…but Adam was the first Homo divinus…made in the image of God” John Stott

23rd April addition
from "the genesis question" Hugh Ross
Bipedal, tool using, comparatively large-brained primates (called hominids by anthropologists) may have roamed Earth as long as 1.5 million years, but religious relics and alters date back only as far as 24,000 years, at most, and art containing indisputable spiritual content just 5000 years. Thus, the archaeological debate for the beginning of spirit expression agrees with the biblical date. p 110

no shred of evidence credibly links Neanderthals with spiritual activity page 112

In 1995 a Y-chromosome research project -- one which examined 100 times more nucleotide bases than any previous study -- fixed the date for the most recent common ancestor of all human males at somewhere between 35,000 and 47,000 BC... Mitochondrial DNA results typically place the most recent common ancestor of all women somewhere between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of years earlier.... While scientists ponder the reason for this discrepancy, Genesis provides an explanation. Genesis reveals that we can expect to find a much earlier date for the most recent common ancestor of all women than for the most recent common ancestor of all men because of what happened in the flood. Of the eight people on board Noah's Ark, the four men were blood related but not before women. Thus, the most recent common ancestor for the four men on Noah's Ark (and for all men since) was Noah; the most recent common ancestor for the four women on the Ark, Noah's wife and the daughters-in-law, could go back all the way to Eve. The difference in the two biochemical dates roughly fits the timeframe suggested by the Genesis 5 genealogy. p 112