Are ancient human species like Homo erectus considered descendants of Prophet Adam (A.S.)?

Question

Are all human species (like homo erectus) children of Adam A.S ?

Or are some of them not human but just resemble them and have no free will?

They are alleged to be around like 500k or 1 million years ago.

Answer 1

We can't exactly answer this perfectly, as we do not exactly know yet how human-like species like Neanderthals, Homo erectus, etc. went extinct. They aren't exactly extinct extinct, as we all carry very slight traces of their genetic material.

What Allah says in the Qur'an (and by extension, what Islam teaches) is not science, philosophy, maths, or anything of that sort, rather Allah says what the Qur'an is in the beginning itself:

ذَٰلِكَ ٱلْكِتَـٰبُ لَا رَيْبَ ۛ فِيهِ ۛ هُدًۭى لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ

This is the Book! There is no doubt about it - a guide for those mindful ˹of Allah˺ (Verse 2:2, from the Clear Quran, by Dr. Mustafa Khattab)

The Prophet (ﷺ) also did not explain anything that we could use either, so we are left to wonder how we could fit both together. What we can observe is that all these species are extinct except for the homo sapiens (us). We also have the bones of those earlier humans to see how they may have lived, how they looked, their body structure, etc.

Allah says in the Qur'an, in verse 95:4, the following:

لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ فِىٓ أَحْسَنِ تَقْوِيمٍۢ

Indeed, We created humans in the best form.

This specific verse is, of course, referring to homo sapiens. We were created in the best form, and we can see that. It's possible we homo sapiens are the cause of their extinction, because we were better than them. That's one theory.

Another possibility is that all the other humans could have been other animals Allah created, and then he plopped Adam (ﷺ) into the mix later on. We also can't date when each human specie started, and we can only set a minimum barrier to the "this specie lived this many years ago" number, because it's possible that there is another fossil that is much older than the ones we have.

It is possible Adam (ﷺ) was a human and was not a homo sapien, homo erectus, but was THE human. He had many children with Hawwa, so it's possible these children may have been the different species of humans. As the story goes, Habil was good-looking, his sister was bad-looking, Qabil was bad-looking, his sister was good-looking. Qabil killed Habil and fled to another region, which bred transgressing people. Adam (ﷺ) and Hawwa had more children after them, and his descendant, Idris (ﷺ) took over as the prophet after him. There was Sheath (ﷺ), the son of Adam (ﷺ), who may have been a prophet too, but is not named in the Qur'an.

Idris (ﷺ) fought the transgressing people and won, and his descendant was Nuh (ﷺ), and everyone knows the story of the flood, that destroyed pretty much all of the human population, except for Nuh (ﷺ) and some of his people. From Adam (ﷺ) to Nuh (ﷺ) was a long period of time, and we should also note these people from the past lived much longer, but probably not long enough though. There were other nations after Nuh (ﷺ) - the Prophet after him was Hud (ﷺ), who had 'Ad, a nation that was destroyed, then Salih (ﷺ), who had Thamud, a nation that was also destroyed. There were countless other destroyed, so it's possible they just got filtered out, and the homo sapiens remained in the end.

This also explains how we have traces of their genes, but it's also possible that they were so closely related to us, that we were able to produce offsprings from them. But since so many species were so similar, and that's fairly unfound in nature, it's possible.

I can give another possibility though: the other human species left before Adam (ﷺ), which is unlikely, but possible. Around 150,000 years ago, which is after the coming of homo sapiens but before they left Africa, a severe bottle necking event reduced the human population to almost extinction. Mitochondrial Eve is the name given to a woman, who is a common ancestor to every single human being alive on earth right now, and is the most recent common ancestor as far as we know. This was not a one-time thing though, this happened several times, for reasons we can't exactly know archaelogically, which gives this possibility a plausibility.

In summary, it's one of these possibilities:

• Yes, they are descendants of Adam (ﷺ), but they got destroyed by Allah, or was killed by us.
• No, they aren't descendants of Adam (ﷺ).
  • We started existing alongside them, but same outcome: they were destroyed by Allah or killed by us.
  • Adam (ﷺ) came after them, and we don't know how they disappeared.

In the end, it does not affect our religion, not contradict it, nor was it an essential part of faith, that Allah answered in the Qur'an, or the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) explained in a hadith. This is as much as I could think up of it, it's your choice to choose, and If I am wrong, please do correct me. But of course, Allahu A'lam.