A Characterization Trope distinguishing a character who is the first human being or one of the first human beings.
The hominin tribe is about 6 million years old, and modern man is just the last sliver of it, definitely not the original. The original hominin would not be recognized as any species living today. That is, if anything could be called the original hominin; 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. See also Monster Progenitor, for other types of beings who are the first of their kinds. Contrast Last of His Kind. If these people spoke a specific language, see also Primordial Tongue.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Delicious in Dungeon: Late into the series, an extended flashback to the time of the Ancient Civilization strongly implies that the ancients were the common ancestors of all modern human species: tall-men, elves, dwarves, and so on, with various individuals blending features like the stature of tall-men, slightly pointed ears, thick beards, etcetera. The ancients speciating out into the five Human Subspecies appears to be the end result of them performing Bio-Augmentation on themselves using wish magic.
- In 7th Garden, Iola and Liz are venerated as the first man and woman by the Church of Anti-Quoristianity, though unlike Adam and Eve they're brother and sister rather than husband and wife. Despite looking like scrawny teens, the two of them have been around for thousands of years and possess powers like those of Vyrde and the angels, making them valuable allies in Vyrde and Awyn's quest to take the angels down. In the context of the virtual world that is 7th Garden, Iola and Liz are the first artificial intelligences to inhabit the world, having been created by Vyrde's older sister Sefira to act as her helpers.
- 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. He goes toe to toe with Zeus, whose lightning speed surpasses even time, with the use of his nearly divine ability to copy another's moves. Ultimately, although the match goes down to the wire, Zeus does manage to defeat and kill him, but not before humanity is inspired to keep fighting back.
Comic Books
- In More Fun Comics, it is revealed that Koth hates humanity because he is the Sole Survivor of Ancient Astronauts whose ship crashed on the Earth, the only member of the crew to escape the subsequent massacre Protohumans carried out while the astronauts were helpless. Despite the fact these proto humans and Homo Sapiens technically aren't even the same species, Koth doesn't care. They share a genus, and that's a good enough reason to Kill All Humans. The fact that the servants he has acquired over the eons in the ether realm he retreated to also look mostly human and might also be more closely related than Koth realizes never crosses his mind.
- 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. As one of the "Fallen Stars", Adam K'ad-mon is in fact a Public Domain Character who predates Marvel Comics as a concept, making him older than Galactus and the One Above All, original man to a degree beyond any other Marvel claimant, though we don't know the which public domain characters the other Fallen Stars originally were yet(and possibly never will)
- 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.
Films — Live-Action
- 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.
- The Masquerade: Owing to Falcrest's belief in Lamarckian inheritance, Incrastic science holds that modern man is descended from a Template Race that accumulated different adaptations and mutations as it spread across the world. Hesychast, founder of these beliefs, is also convinced the Template Race was created out of whole cloth by sapient deep-sea cephalopods with Biomanipulation powers, but this is a fringe theory.
- 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
- Sisyphean: The plot of Castellum Natatorius revolves around Pancestor, a mummified corpse retrieved from an archaeological expedition that's speculated to be the ancient ancestor of humanity. Pancestor is clearly a Homo sapiens and "humanity" refers to a species of Insectoid Aliens, but the preceding story Cavumville showed that the humans of the future have the ability to evolve/mutate into wildly divergent forms. In the end, it turns out Pancestor is not the ancestor of humanity, but of the castellae they live on, in a montage demonstrating our evolution from bipedal apes to city-sized aquatic mollusks.
- 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 1:27-28, 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 man, Adam, is formed from the dirt and receives life from God's breath. After experiencing loneliness and naming the animals, God takes a piece of Adam's rib and from it creates the first woman, Eve, whom Adam praises. Genesis 3 then tells of how the first humans lived with God in the Garden of Eden and did not know death, labor-pains, toil, or shame. But then they broke the one rule given to them by God when they ate the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and were banished from Eden by God as punishment.
- 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 Anti-God 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 Pangu was a giant and modern man were as fleas living on his flesh. When Pangu died, his remains became many of the Earth's features. In fact, there would not even be a planet if Pangu 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 in Shintoism 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.
- RuneQuest: Grandfather Mortal was the first man, made through the cooperation of the gods. He fathered many races, built some more, and provided the form for others that were created during the Gods Age. Most intelligent humanoid species trace their descent from him, including humans, elves, trolls, and merfolk. When he became the first being to be slain by Death, all of his descendants were marked with the doom of mortality. Since dwarves and dragonewts do not descend from him, they are the only material species who do not die of age.
Toys
- Transformers: The Thirteen Primes are the first Transformers, directly created by the hand of Primus himself. The precise details vary between continuities, but they're generally treated like demigods, if not actual gods, and possess powers (or just artifacts of power) that verge on the supernatural. In some continuities, all modern Transformers are descended from one of the Thirteen in some fashion, with traits such as combination or bestial alternate modes being inherited from their progenitor.
Video Games
- Dark Souls I, 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.
- Limbus Company: Getting this to exist turns out to be the goal of Gregor's mother Hermann. All of her experiments with the Mirror Worlds, re-forming the League Of Nine and racing against The Sinners for the Golden Boughs have been in service of re-creating the original and strongest form of humanity.
- 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:
- 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. They would not have stood quite as upright as modern man, would have been heavier, with stockier, stronger limbs, thicker, stronger bones, more muscle mass, thicker skin, wider nasal cavities, thicker noses, bigger eyes for better night vision, wider mouths with wider teeth but a surprisingly low bite force relative to its size, greater lung capacity, wider fingers designed more for gripping and less for dexterity, an increased metabolic rate, increased lifting and pulling endurance, much less running endurance with a higher ration of fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fibers, and larger brains relative to the rest of their bodies that were arranged differently than ours, with a larger focus on memory than problem solving. They nonetheless would likely be just as smart as we were just because of the greater grey matter ratio, more resistant to injury and better suited to both cold climates and temperature shifts. They wouldn't have been as good at throwing objects as modern man, however, and would have required a lot more food. There is DNA evidence that suggest they interbred with Cro-Magnon, which is closer to modern man, but traces of neanderthal get increasingly scarce in less ancient Cro-Magnon samples.
- 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 would have been outwardly identical to the Cro-Magnons beyond becoming taller on average and having lighter skin tones, but there were some sharp differences between Cro-Magnon and modern humans. Many populations of modern humans, including those of European descent, are somewhat prone retaining lactose tolerance after maturation due to a mutation, and all modern humans have less dense, less durable bones than Cro-Magnon. Cro-Magnon also had a larger brain to body size than modern humans. Their brains seemed to be arranged the same way ours are but longer. They were overall taller than modern man, only being shorter than Europeans on average because of a few outlying exceptionally tall European populations, though at the rates modern man has been getting taller it is expected all will eventually surpass Cro-Magnon. It's been speculated that at identical heights with identical exercise, Cro-Magnon would have also been more muscular than modern man, while retaining the proficiency for ranged weaponry modern man has that Neanderthals lacked (throwing is one of the few things humans do better than any other animal) but would have required a lot more food than modern man. Like similar ice age animals, DNA evidence suggests Cro-Magnon were mostly gone by the neolithic period, but very small traces of them linger in the genetics of modern humans.
- 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.
- Regarding what we would immediately recognize as human:
- 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.
- In the more specific sense of "the most recent common ancestors of all humans alive today," we have two individuals known informally as "Y-chromosomal Adam
" and "Mitochondrial Eve," the oldest humans known to have left an unbroken line of descent in the male and female lines respectively to all humans currently on Earth. It is important to note that 1.) There almost certainly are other men and women (both contemporary and older) who left behind living descendants, but we have no way to trace their lineage down to all living humans; and 2.) These two people may never have interacted and possibly weren't even alive at the same time.