The story of Pelagius and Augustine is full of intrigue.  After the Council of Diospolis (415 AD) gave Pelagius the green light, the Council of Carthage (418) disputed its findings.  Pope Zozimus issued his Tractoria (418) just as the curtain fell on the Roman Empire.

Eleven centuries later, at the Council of Trent, the question of Original Sin was raised.  Gone were the old models of the human as anima joined to caro by spiritus.  New models of the human were abounding.  It is amazing that the Council did as well as it did.  One of the two key canons of the Council of Carthage was presented. The other was disregarded.

What amazes me in reading Zimmerman’s end-of-life book is that his own work attempted the same turn as the Council of Trent.  He looked at the Council of Trent in the same way that it looked at the Council of Carthage, knowing that some of it would keep and some of it would not.  The last 450 years have been equivalent to 1100 years at the time of Trent.  Yet, Zimmerman could not do the sorting.

In a way, he did not have all the pieces of the puzzle of “where he stood”.  By 1998, when he published, details of the evolutionary trajectory of the hominids were becoming irrefutable.  When he published in 1998, it made sense that Adam – the first human – would have to be placed deep into the past, before the appearance of the first fossils of anatomically modern humans.   At this time, speech was regarded as one of Homo sapiens’ species-specific traits.  Evolutionary biologists considered the evolution of speech to be the same as the evolution of language (the biological capacity to talk).

In this, Zimmerman has been joined by a number of Christians exploring the question of “who Adam and Eve might have been”?

I write in 2012.  Details of the evolutionary trajectory of the hominids have not changed much.  Our understanding of talk has.  There has been a revolution in the field of semiotics.  Much of that is due to Thomas Sebeok and John Deely.

The evolution of talk differs from the evolution of language.  “Adam” – the first human – can now be distinguished from “Adam” – the person in the Story of Adam and Eve.  That is the premise of An Archaeology of the Fall.