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Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
My reference simply meant if you were to look at Earth's history over 4.6 billion years and the history of Homo Sapiens over the last 200,000 years.
Personally I believe the account in the Bible with Man basically begins with the beginning of written language and the agricultural revolution (Adam & Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), though chapter 1 gives an exceedingly brief nod to a longer history than that.
Still, I would argue that "Homo Sapiens" are different from "Man" in that they only represent the flesh, whereas "Man" includes written language, culture, and everything else that comes with it.
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Written language is, no doubt, important to the understanding of human culture including the transmission of religion. However, a lot of language development had to take place before written language was possible.
The development of the symbolic self is intimately tied to the development of language. Gestures are behavioral responses of animals to stimuli from other organisms. But non-humans don't understand the “meaning” of their gestures. They simply respond, that is, they use symbols without “significance.”
For a gesture to have significance, it must evoke in a second organism a response that is functionally identical to the response that the first organism anticipates. In other words, for a gesture to be significant it must “mean” the same thing to both organisms, and “meaning” involves the capacity to consciously anticipate how other organisms will respond to symbols or gestures. It does so through the "vocal gesture."
A vocal gesture can be thought of as a word or phrase. When a vocal gesture is used the individual making the gesture responds implicitly in the same manner as the individual hearing it. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in the individual making them the same responses which the explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals.
The critical importance of language in the development of human experience lies in this fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other. All this was necessary for human interaction prior to the invention of written language.
I also noticed the way you used the word ""flesh".
Flesh has multiple sometimes overlapping meanings in the Bible.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/flesh/
Your use of the word suggests that you may be looking at it from the standpoint of mind-body dualism. Contemporary neuroscience has departed from that kind of thinking. Yet, neuroscience is not necessarily incompatible with Bible if it's interpreted phenomenologically.