If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation.

For example, the Bible says in Genesis:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

And an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which I know a lot about because I was a member of the organization for 35 years, similarly taught that humans are the top of creation -- and that it is only possible to return to God if one has a human form (the group believes in reincarnation). Further, supposedly there always is at least one human who is God in Human Form, and who is responsible for taking "marked souls" back to the highest supernatural realm of creation.

Since I love to delve into weird theological questions, even though I no longer believe in God or the supernatural, a couple of way-cool graphic depictions of human origins in the National Geographic story got me pondering some pertinent issues about the whole "top of creation" thing.

Here's photographs of the graphic depictions. I've made them as large as possible.

The top graphic says: 

Homo sapiens are the only humans left on Earth today, but at one point we shared the planet with other species of ancestral humans, collectively known as hominins. As climates and ecological opportunities shifted, hominins migrated out of Africa, reconnecting and interbreeding with the descendants of their relatives who had made similar journeys thousands of years before.

So do all of the hominin species count as being the "top of creation," or only our species, Homo sapiens? The bottom graphic shows that hominins have been around for over four million years. If they count as ancestral humans, then the RSSB philosophy implies that Gods in Human Form have been on our planet for that length of time.

But let's assume that only species in the genus Homo count as humans. That graphic says:

Homo sapiens are the only remaining humans. Our genus, Homo, features relatively larger brains, full bipedalism, and the ability to make tools. 

The right side of the graphic shows that there have been about ten species in the genus Homo. Seemingly they all would count as being the top of creation, being humans. This includes our closest relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. 

From the graphic, our species diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 800,000 years ago, though the top graphic says that the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil dates from about 300,000 years ago. Thus those who believe in the RSSB teachings have to accept that there were Gods in Human Form at least that long ago, and almost certainly they killed animals and ate meat -- which is against the current RSSB teaching.

Another question is whether Homo sapiens is the species that will forever be the "top of creation." After all, evolution hasn't stopped. There's a good chance our species won't last forever. The National Geographic story says:

The disappearance of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other groups around 40,000 years ago marked the end of millions of years when multiple groups of hominins walked the Earth. The current epoch is a historical anomaly, and Stringer [a paleoanthropologist] advises us not to be smug in our status as the last ones standing.

Neanderthals and Denisovans survived for half a million years; Homo erectus lasted nearly two million years. At the rate we're going, how successful will we look in 2,000 years, much less a million?

Comments

[umami]

Cats. Cats are the top of creation. The meow shall inherit the earth.

[sant64]

The teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) don’t explicitly state that there has always been a master on Earth at every moment throughout history. Instead, they emphasize the necessity and importance of a living master for spiritual guidance in the context of their path, known as Sant Mat. The core belief is that a living master is essential for a seeker to connect with the divine sound current (Shabd) and progress spiritually toward God-realization.

RSSB teachings suggest that masters appear when needed, as appointed by the divine will, to guide souls back to their true home. This implies a continuity of masters over time, but not necessarily an unbroken presence of a physical master on Earth at every single moment. The focus is more on the idea that, at any given time when there are souls ready to be guided, a living master will be present to fulfill that role. For example, it’s said that the master’s role is to connect the disciple’s soul to the Shabd at initiation, and this guidance continues even beyond the master’s physical life through their inner radiant form.

Historically, RSSB traces its lineage from its founding in 1891 by Shiv Dayal Singh (Soami Ji Maharaj) through a succession of masters, like Jaimal Singh, Sawan Singh, Charan Singh, and currently Gurinder Singh. This succession reflects a belief that the divine ensures a master is available for those on the path, but it doesn’t claim that a master has been physically present on Earth continuously since the beginning of time. Rather, the teachings highlight that the Shabd itself is eternal, and the master, as a manifestation of that divine power in human form, appears in the world as part of a divine plan to assist souls.

Morever, RSSB doesn't hold that spiritual evolution depends upon a shabd master. The core of RSSB theology is related to the Vedas, which say that our world and every being in it are the substance of Purusha, i.e. God. RSSB gurus often cite John's "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God" as the basic idea behind how creation came to be, as well as the path of return to our source.

The Vedas, the ancient sacred texts of Hinduism, don’t provide a straightforward, explicit statement like “people have always existed on Earth” in the way we might expect from a modern historical or scientific perspective. Instead, their view of time, existence, and humanity is deeply cosmological, cyclical, and metaphysical, which makes the answer more nuanced.
In the Vedic tradition, time is not linear but cyclic, organized into vast repeating cycles called yugas (ages)—Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali—within larger units like manvantaras (epochs ruled by a Manu) and kalpas (cosmic days of Brahma). Each cycle involves creation, sustenance, and dissolution, followed by a new creation. For instance, the Rig Veda (10.129, the Nasadiya Sukta) describes the origins of the universe in a poetic, philosophical way, hinting at a state before existence where neither being nor non-being was present, until creation emerges through divine will or cosmic order (Rta). This suggests that humanity, as part of the created order, didn’t “always” exist in an eternal, unchanging sense but came into being within these cycles.

The Vedas also speak of human-like figures—sages (rishis), gods (devas), and the first man, Manu—in ways that imply a beginning to human presence on Earth tied to cosmic events. Manu, often considered the progenitor of humanity in Vedic and later texts like the Manusmriti, is said to repopulate the world after a great dissolution (pralaya), as seen in stories like the flood narrative in the Shatapatha Brahmana (1.8.1). This indicates that humans exist within the framework of each creation cycle, not necessarily “always” in an absolute sense across all eternity or beyond these cycles.

Moreover, the Vedas focus heavily on the eternal nature of the soul (atman), which is distinct from the physical body or earthly existence. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (part of the Vedic corpus) and other texts suggest that souls are eternal, cycling through births and deaths, but this eternity applies to the spiritual essence, not the physical presence of people on Earth. The Earth itself, in Vedic cosmology, is a temporary stage within the broader cosmic play, created and dissolved repeatedly.

So if our ancestors were neanderthals, troglodytes, or some lower species, I can't see a clear conflict with RSSB theology.

[darwinwho?]

A close reading of RSSB books indicates that t don't accept Darwinian evolution since they tend to believe that each species was distinctly created.

[Homosapien]

According to Radhaswami sect, man has had millions of births and he has been collecting the karma of millions of births. Whereas it has been only a few hundred thousand years since Homo sapiens came into existence. About 15000 thousand years ago, humans started living in settlements and farming. Whereas Radhaswami has calculated the karma of millions of births.

[Resident of China]

Why do these Babas take incarnation only in India? Why are Babas not born in China? Everything is written in the Vedas, yet why is there no mention of dinosaurs in the Vedas? Why are the vehicles of the gods and goddesses in the Vedas the same animals that are found in India? Why is there no mention of animals found in Africa and Australia?

[Ron E.]

The notion here is in the mind-ridden belief or assumption that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution. When it comes to the pinnacle of evolution, with species survival it has to be down to the survival of the fittest; what species is able or has been able to survive through the millions of years of dramatic earth upheavals and almost complete species wipe-out. Organisms such as sponges, some shellfish, louse, jellyfish etc. have been around for several hundred million years and look like being able to continue.

It's high time we ditched the various medieval religious thinking and belief systems that knew no better than to assume or believe that mankind was/is the pinnacle of creation. Of course, since the ‘homo’ species evolved the conceptual ability to imagine and feel that we have a separate self (ego or soul), it follows that this self-important and self-promoting structure would assume itself to be the pinnacle of life – and for some, even able to continue somehow after death. Such arrogance!

Quite probably, mankind in its current form could survive for many more millions of years if it's eventually realised that the crisis is not in the economic world, or in the political world, the crisis is in consciousness, that is, the life-negating contents that presently make up the human mind. Of course, if we continue to make the planet more inhabitable in the future, we may develop the technological capability to live in outer space somehow. If still stuck on an uninhabitable Earth, I’m sure the most wealthy, powerful and influential people would survive somehow in self-sustaining, perhaps underground communities – pity about the rest of us!

[sant64]

"Doubt, however honest, cannot take the place of belief." -- Will Durant

[Appreciative Reader]

This reminds me of a sci fi I'd read, a long time ago, that was (in part) about a fight for survival between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Neanderthals were the more civilized people, in that story, civilized but sane and peaceable; while us humans were, well, what we are still, warlike and barbaric. We end up wiping them out, in that part of the story, despite their greater strength, through some kind of subterfuge, the details of which I've forgotten, by somehow betraying their instinctual trust in us, something like that. In that story, the leader/king of the Neanderthals was called Ahriman, and sure enough we demonized him in our early scriptures as a Lucifer-like embodiment of evil.

Don't remember who the the author was, but I remember having enjoyed the book, in a completely non-serious non-profound easy-reading kind of way.

(No, nothing to do with theology, or religion. Well, apart from that specific Zoroaster-Zend-Avesta-Ahriman angle. Just tangentially related, is all, but still.)

[Appreciative Reader]

Although: How might an apologist field this particular question you've raised here? The Christian apologist defending Biblical claims about man's place in God's scheme of things? Indic-religious apologists defending more subtle macrocosm-within-microcosm claims, and human-birth-necessary-for-salvation arguments, and wheel-of-84 arguments? How might those tie up in context of Neanderthals, and other early cousins of Homo Sapient?

I'm guessing they'll go for obfuscation. Maybe play the metaphor card. Essentially, yeah, some variation of obfuscation.

But should someone have some argument that holds up, as far as this specific question of yours, Brian, then that will be interesting. Not convincing, not in and of itself, given it's all unsupported nonsense anyway. But interesting nevertheless, and a substantial and welcome addition to this discussion.

Should any apologist, Christian or RSSB-ic, or any other, want to have a go, then we won't laugh at you, promise. We'll hear you patiently and fully. Or at least, I will. With no broader criticism of such apologetics, beyond just the specific being argued, and in perfectly respectful tones.

So step up, if you've a mind to, to answer Brian's question from a position of defending your particular religious ideas.