Prologue

Abstract

For many centuries, the Bible provided Western societies with their story of how Man was created. Throughout that time, it was incontrovertibly true that Man was created on the sixth day, between the making of the world and God’s day of rest. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, this accepted account of creation was usurped with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871. More than simply presenting a novel scientific theory, these two books laid the foundations for a completely new story of creation in which Man had his beginnings in a long-distant evolutionary past.