A Characterization Trope distinguishing a character who is the first human being or one of the first human beings.
The hominid tribe is about 6 million years old, and modern man is just the last sliver of it, definitely not the original. The original hominid would not be recognized as any species living today. That is if anything could be called the original hominid; rather than a single such species having ever existed, today's paleontologists reconstruct a gradual transition with no clear break. But there has been much speculation, study and effort to find the original man, probably some outlandish fiction too. In fact, this is one of the oldest tropes in the book. Can overlap with Advanced Ancient Humans, depending on how complex original man's society was or Humanity Came from Space if original man did not develop on Earth. Also compare with Frazetta Man and All Cavemen Were Neanderthals.
A variation of the trope is an older species of man that was wiped out before ours began or is biologically independent of the Homo sapiens species in some other way. In these cases human identification is a must, otherwise they belong under precursors. Identification, not necessarily familiarity.
May be named Adam and/or Eve.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Record of Ragnarok has Adam, the Father of Humanity, as the second Einherjar fighting in humanity's defense in the titular tournament. Unlike most of the other competitors, Adam is shown to be a pretty chill and stoic guy rather than an excitable Blood Knight, simply battling to defend his vast extended family, something which earns him the universal adulation of humanity and the respect of the gods. Adam is also possessed of preternatural physical abilities because, as the first man, he is the human closest to the gods; even without the Valkyrie's ritual he was able to mutilate the divine Serpent that framed his wife Eve for a crime and led to their mutual fall from grace and he goes toe to toe with Zeus, whose lightning speed surpasses even time. Ultimately, although the match goes down to the wire, Zeus still defeats and kills him, but not before humanity is inspired to keep fighting back.
Comic Books
- In The DCU, recurring villain Vandal Savage (originally a Green Lantern villain but nowadays a big-name bad guy who'll fight anyone) is usually one of the very first Homo sapiens to exist, rendered immortal by a Magic Meteor. (Apart from the weird Final Crisis tie-in which depicted him as literally the Biblical Cain, although some later writers adopted this as Metaphorically True in the "first cold-blooded murderer" sense.)
- Marvel Universe:
- Adam K'ad-mon is a Man-Thing lookalike who is believed by some to be the original human being and protects the Primal Matrix, which is the focal point of the multiverse.
- In the Earth X/Universe X/Paradise X trilogy, the original humans were a feral, beastlike race before the Celestials came to our planet and began fiddling with our genetics. The Celestials use young planets as "incubators" for their kind, and superhumans were created to act as "antibodies" to protect the planet from invasion — particularly from Galactus, their sworn enemy. It turns out that Wolverine is not a mutant, but actually the last "pure" human left alive.
- Marville: Wolverine was the first human. He evolved from an otter.
Film
- In Mission to Mars, the then famous face was theorized to have been carved by original man. (Then famous because when we actually saw it in real life it turned out not to be a face.)
Literature
- Discworld: One early novel reveals that the First Men of the Disc created by the gods were immensely powerful beings, which took one look at their situation, including their suboptimal gods, and lost their tempers. This resulted in an all-out war between humanity and the gods, after which the High Old Ones — immensely powerful beings who rule over the universe — stepped in and, to prevent such a crisis from recurring, confined the gods to the center of the Disc and re-created men to be a good deal smaller.
- Nightside: References here and there suggest that humankind was originally intended/planned/expected to be much more powerful, perceptive, and glorious than we actually are. Just who/what came up with that intention/plan/expectation, and whether it was an injustice or a mercy that we didn't turn out that way, is left unsaid.
- Red Dwarf: The prologue to Last Human describes the birth of the first Homo habilis, a girl. Her australopithecine mother is alarmed at the child's short limbs, high forehead and large head — clearly, she isn't going to be like anyone, ever.note
- In Symposium, Plato makes a fictional Aristophanes present a "Just So" Story on the origin of love. According to this tale, humans as originally created by the titans were not like we are today: We had two heads, four legs, four arms and both sets of reproductive organs. The later gods changed us to be more like them (which is better than what they considered doing). The idea was to make us wish for the parts we no longer had and supposed to teach us love.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): The people of Kobol whose ancestors became the Twelve Colonies were this, although the primitive humans of Earth (2) appear to be a separate "creation" of that series' God.
- Fringe: Before The Reveal, the First People were believed to be this. Much was made of them being an ancient civilization of human beings — the first humans — that supposedly predated Adam, Eve and the dinosaurs. This was a bizarre claim even for a show where computer viruses can infect the human brain. Later, it's revealed that the "First People" are actually the future versions of the main characters who designed the technology attributed to this ancient civilization and sent it back in time through a wormhole to the distant past.
- Stargate-verse: The Alterans, an ancient human subspecies predating Cro-Magnon. They are indistinguishable from homo sapiens outwardly, technically have much greater genetic diversity on account of longer existence and wider distribution but so few are left in the visible universe that it is almost a moot point, and most of them Ascended thousands of years ago. The Stargate builders among them left behind a lot of technology that only works when used by people with their genes though.
Mythology, Oral Tales, and Religion
- The Book of Genesis describes the creation of humans beings twice. Studies of Hebrew narrative grammar indicate this is a matter of "summary vs details", rather than two separate events. Genesis 1 describes the creation of humans in relation to the rest of the universe. Genesis 2 takes a closer look at the details of how they were created.
- In Genesis 1:1-2:3, male and female are created in God's image, before being told to take care of the Earth and multiply across it by God.
- In Genesis 2:4-25, the first human is formed from the dirt and receives life from God's breath. After experiencing loneliness and naming the animals God creates, the human's rib is removed and from it is formed woman, who the first man praises. The first humans here know not death, labor-pains, toil, or shame before violating the law of the Garden and being forced out into the harsher wider world.
- In the Zohar and other Kabbalah texts, the original man, Adam Kadmon, is not so much a physical being as it is a spiritual realm from which every human body gets its soul.
- Thanks to syncretism, the original woman is sometimes equated to Lilith (originally an animal in The Bible or a demon in Mesopotamian Mythology) in certain traditions, which would make her very different from modern woman.
- In Manichean religion, original man was a creation of God given to the world of light to help them fight off the invading forces of The Antigod from the world of darkness. Modern man was a mistake caused by not properly following God's instruction.
- In a lot of Gnostic discourses, modern man is said to be an illusion and inferior imitation of the original man.
- Adam and Eve are described as having been giants (about 60 cubits tall, or 90 feet) in Islamic tradition, with each successive generation of descendants gradually decreasing in proportions to the size modern humans have been for the last few thousand years. Also, humans originally did not age but started doing so many thousands of years later (partially in response to Abraham asking God for a sign that his life is nearing its end).
- In some Chinese creation stories, original man Pan Gu was a giant and modern man were as fleas living on his flesh. When Pan Gu died his remains became many of the Earth's features. In fact there would not even be a planet if Pan Gu had not shaped it while he was alive.
- The original man, Kali (or Kaliyan) was born from a fragment of evil in Ayyavazhi mythology and he and his later created wife are distinct from swyambhuvana manu, the naturally evolved man of wider Hindu religion (and is not to be confused with the righteous goddess Kali either).
- In Mayan Mythology, the gods tried to destroy original man with a great flood but a few people managed to survive. For this act of defiance they were turned into the monkeys which populate the American jungles to this day.
- Aztec Mythology, told that the original human race was devoured by ocelots. Not so cute anymore is it?
- Creek Indians had taught that sky people predated the human race and that fire was stolen from them for us.
- Izanagi and Izanami of Shinto are often interpreted as a god couple by modern readers but the classical texts suggest something more along the lines of original human beings, the vast differences between us and them simply popping up over time.
- The oral history of the Hadza people of Tanzania mention their oldest ancestors as hairy giants who lived more like animals. These were replaced by a race just as tall but used fire, medicine, domesticated dogs and lived in caves.
Radio
- In Old Harry's Game, when Satan takes Edith to meet Adam and Eve:
Edith: I didn't expect them to look quite so much like monkeys.
Satan: Well, that's evolution for you.
Tabletop Games
- Demon: The Fallen depicts Adam and Eve as Ultimate Lifeforms. Their antediluvian descendants are also described as exceptionally powerful, if only because they had infinite faith (in God and the angels) — something that their modern descendants severely lack, much to the dismay of the returning Fallen.
Video Games
- Dark Souls, in a late (and hidden) dialogue, it's revealed that Humanity's progenitor and thus the player character's ancestor is none other than The Furtive Pygmy, a character only briefly shown in the opening cutscene and is described as "so easily forgotten", and who, in the dawn of time, gained the power of the titular Dark Soul.
- Halo: The original humans were a collection of different hominid species who used to hold one of the strongest interstellar empires in the galaxy. Then, tens of thousands of years ago, the Forerunners defeated them, erased all traces of their empire, stripped them of all their technology, forcibly devolved them into a more primitive state, and quarantined the vast majority of them on their home planet of Erde-Tyrene.
- Nasuverse: Copies are always inferior to the original, and since children are considered copies of their parents, the first humans (i.e. human archetypes) were immensely more powerful than their modern descendants.
- Xenogears: The humans that live on the planet the game is set on are descendants of the creations of "Deus", the supercomputer that acts as the overarching central antagonist. As such, all humans are "pieces" of Deus itself that it one day plans to absorb as part of a millennia-long self-repair program. The "original" humans were part of the spaceship which Deus took over and destroyed.
Western Animation
- Played for Laughs in Hazbin Hotel. Adam from the Garden of Eden was the "first man", and as such he essentially functions as the Anthropomorphic Personification of Testosterone Poisoning, with the personality of a sailor-mouthed Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll-loving Frat Bro with a penchant for violence. His Villainous Breakdown in the finale has him demanding worship for the sole fact that "all of humanity came from these fucking nuts!"
Real Life
- "The" Original Man is suspect, as we cannot be sure a new fossil won't be discovered that's a better candidate than the currently-known hominids. Plus, where do you draw the line between Original Man and common ancestor of humans and other apes?
- Regarding what we would immediately recognize as human:
- The first anatomically modern inhabitants of Europe are referred to as the Cro-Magnon peoples. They existed about 300,000 years ago based on fossil evidence, and another hundred thousand or so based on DNA evidence. Modern Europeans are identical to the Cro-Magnons beyond becoming a little taller, having lighter skin tones, and retaining lactose tolerance after maturation due to a mutation.
- In the case of Homo sapiens as we are, there is Homo sapiens idaltu, which lived in Ethiopia about 160,000 years ago. In fact, the translated name actually means "First born/Elder Wise Man" in Afari (an Ethiopian language) and Latin.
- While they're typically considered to be distinct species, neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis are sometimes classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens heidelbergensis. This would put the first Homo sapiens at around 600,000 years ago.
- Regarding more distant ancestors:
- Homo erectus was apparently able to speak, built rafts or simple boats, used fire and probably wore animal skins, and the first known fossil of Homo erectus dates to 1.8 million years ago.
- Arguably the first member in the Homo genus belongs to Homo habilis, though some would say they were australopiths and not human beings, and an intermediate form dates back to 2.6 million years ago.
- Some people hold that australopiths are also human beings, making Original Man arise about six million years ago.
- Regarding what we would immediately recognize as human:
