Death Before the Fall — The Fossil Record, Neanderthals, and the Adamic Covenant

The CES Letter treats “no death before the Fall” as a binding, young-earth test of Latter-day Saint faith. But the whole question was removed from the realm of required belief at the highest level of the Church more than eight decades before Jeremy Runnells wrote — and a better-attested reading was sitting in the published record the whole time.

The Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument

LDS scripture teaches there was no death before the Fall, roughly 6,000 years ago. Yet the fossil record shows billions of years of life and death, and Neanderthal DNA persists in modern humans — proof that our ancestors interbred with a population that predates the LDS timeline by hundreds of thousands of years. On this point, LDS theology is simply incompatible with science.

The Strongest Form of the Objection

A weak answer would wave this away as “just folk belief.” That would be dishonest, so let us state the objection at its strongest. The scriptural language is real and forceful. 2 Nephi 2:22 says that had Adam not transgressed, “all things which were created must have remained in the same state … and they must have remained forever, and had no end.” Moses 6:48 states plainly, “by his fall came death.” And the language is not only scriptural: apostles of the stature of Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie taught a literal, no-death-before-the-Fall position with conviction and in print.

Add the science. The fossil record documents death across hundreds of millions of years without ambiguity. Population genetics indicates the human line never passed through a bottleneck of two individuals, and every non-African population today carries roughly two percent Neanderthal DNA. A faithful reader who assumes the literal reading really is the doctrine has, on that assumption, a genuine collision. We will not pretend otherwise.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Here is the decision point — and Jeremy took the easier road. Two readings of “no death before the Fall” were available to him:

  • The path Jeremy took — the folk-literalist reading: “No death before the Fall” is binding, canonized LDS doctrine, and it is a young-earth, global-biology claim: no organism anywhere died until roughly 6,000 years ago. Read this way, the fossil record refutes it, and the case is closed.
  • The path Jeremy passed over — the covenant reading: The scriptures describe the transition of Adam’s Edenic world into mortality — the entry of spiritual death, moral accountability, and mortal probation for the covenant family of man — and were never framed as a geological census of the whole biosphere. On this reading the Church has never required young-earth creationism, and the fossil record touches nothing the gospel actually teaches.

The decisive fact is this: Jeremy did not have to guess whether either reading was binding. The Church had already spoken to that very point — and in 1931, more than eight decades before the CES Letter, it removed the whole question from the realm of required belief, declining to bind either the literalist reading or its opposite and leaving both open. To make his argument work, Jeremy had to treat as canonized doctrine a reading the highest councils of the Church had expressly refused to require of members. That is choosing the weaker path with the stronger evidence sitting in plain view.

Response

1. The Church Publicly Declined To Bind This Question — in 1931

This is the pre-2013 published record, and it is the heart of the matter. In the late 1920s a sharp dispute arose among senior Brethren over pre-Adamite life and the age of the earth — Elder B. H. Roberts and Elder Joseph Fielding Smith on opposite sides. Rather than canonize either view, the First Presidency of Heber J. Grant issued a formal memorandum to the General Authorities in April 1931. Its instruction was unambiguous:

First Presidency, 1931

“Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. Our mission is to bear the message of the restored gospel to the world. Leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research.”

Read that again. The governing quorum of the Church, faced with exactly the question Jeremy raises, ruled that the age of the earth and the biology of death are not matters of salvation and belong to scientific research. This is not a modern retrofit; it is a pre-war document. When the CES Letter presents “no death before the Fall” as the official LDS position, it presents a view the First Presidency had already set outside the boundary of required belief — and did so in writing, in 1931.

A fair reader will press the obvious objection: the literalist position did not vanish after 1931 — it was taught forcefully for decades more. That is true, and we state it plainly. Elder Joseph Fielding Smith continued to defend a no-death-before-the-Fall, young-earth reading in print, and in 1970 he became President of the Church. Elder Bruce R. McConkie pressed the same reading with characteristic force in Mormon Doctrine (1958; revised 1966). These were apostles and, in Smith’s case, a prophet-president — not fringe voices. But notice what changed and what did not. Prominent apostles taught the literalist reading; other prominent apostles taught the opposite; and through it all the 1931 directive stood, because neither reading was ever brought to the body of the Church and canonized as binding doctrine. That is exactly the point. The existence of forceful apostolic advocacy on one side no more makes it required doctrine than the equally forceful advocacy of Talmage, Widtsoe, and Roberts on the other side makes an ancient earth required doctrine. What is binding is what has been canonized — and on this question, deliberately, nothing was.

2. Senior Apostles Taught an Ancient Earth Openly — and Were Not Silenced

If the literalist reading were binding doctrine, we would expect the Church to discipline apostles who publicly rejected it. It did the opposite.

  • James E. Talmage (Apostle, 1911–1933), a trained geologist, delivered his address The Earth and Man in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in August 1931 — at the First Presidency’s invitation — teaching an ancient earth and pre-Adamic death. It was published in the Deseret News that November and later reprinted by the Church, in the very season of the pre-Adamite dispute.
  • John A. Widtsoe (Apostle, 1921–1952), who held a doctorate in chemistry, wrote that true science and the restored gospel are complementary and rejected young-earth readings in works such as In Search of Truth and Evidences and Reconciliations.
  • B. H. Roberts, a member of the First Council of the Seventy and the Church’s foremost intellectual of his generation, argued at length for pre-Adamite life in his manuscript The Truth, the Way, the Life.

The honest picture is not that the Church had a young-earth doctrine and a few dissenters. It is that faithful apostles held opposite views, taught them, and remained apostles in full standing — because the First Presidency had ruled the matter open. Elder Joseph Fielding Smith’s later young-earth writings, including Man: His Origin and Destiny (1954), were sincere and forceful; but the First Presidency under President David O. McKay declined to endorse the book, and repeatedly stated that the Church had taken no official position on the method of man’s physical creation. Two devoted apostles reaching different conclusions on a question God left unrevealed is not a defect. It is what an honest Church looks like when it refuses to canonize what it has not been given.

3. What 2 Nephi 2:22 and Moses 6:48 Actually Claim

Now to the strongest scriptures, met head-on. Both are unmistakably framed around Adam and Eden, not around the planet’s entire history. 2 Nephi 2:22 is a statement about what would have followed had Adam “remained in the garden of Eden” — a claim about the fate of the Edenic, paradisiacal order, the world Adam was placed in, not a survey of trilobites in Cambrian seas. Its own next verse (2 Nephi 2:23) makes the scope explicit: without the Fall, Adam and Eve “would have had no children … having no joy, for they knew no misery.” The passage is theology of human probation — agency, posterity, joy, and misery — not paleontology.

Moses 6:48’s “by his fall came death” reads the same way the New Testament does. When Paul writes that “by one man … death” entered (Romans 5:12), Christian and Latter-day Saint interpreters alike have long understood him to mean the death that reigns over Adam’s covenant family — the mortality and spiritual separation that the Atonement of Christ answers — not the metabolic death of every organism that ever lived. The Fall brought death into the human story of accountability and redemption. That is the death the scriptures are interested in, because it is the death Christ overcomes. Read for what it is claiming, rather than stretched to answer a geological question it never raises, the text and the fossil record are not even discussing the same subject. A fuller treatment of the doctrine itself is on our companion sites’ pages on the Fall of Adam and Eve and evolution and LDS doctrine.

4. The 7,000 Years of D&C 77:6 Is a Covenant Timeline, Not the Earth’s Age

The “6,000 years” the CES Letter cites descends from D&C 77:6–7, which speaks of “the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence.” The passage is a revealed gloss on the seven-sealed book of Revelation, mapping the seven seals onto seven thousand-year periods of the earth’s temporal (mortal, covenant) existence — the stage of the drama of salvation. It is not a geologist’s clock, and it never claims to be. Reading it as an age-of-the-earth figure is precisely the folk-literalist move the 1931 First Presidency directive set aside. The Latter-day Saint doctrine of a living, purposeful earth passing through ordained epochs coexists comfortably with deep geological time.

5. Adam, Neanderthals, and the Genuinely Open Question

The Neanderthal-DNA point deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. Jeremy’s implied premise is that scripture requires Adam to be the sole biological ancestor of every living human, roughly 6,000 years ago — so any shared ancestry with an older population breaks the account. But that premise is his, not the scriptures’. Latter-day Saint thinkers from B. H. Roberts and James E. Talmage onward have long held that Adam can be the first man of the covenant — the first to receive the gospel, the priesthood, and full moral accountability, the federal head of the redeemed human family — without requiring that no other hominids lived, died, or contributed to the human genome. On that reading, Neanderthal admixture is a fact about biology, and Adam is a truth about covenant; they no more collide than a nation’s founding charter collides with the migration record of the people who later ratified it.

Honesty requires a boundary here: exactly how Adam relates to the broader hominid record is not revealed, and faithful Latter-day Saints hold a range of views. That question is genuinely open. What is not open is whether the DNA data falsifies LDS scripture — because the scripture never staked the claim Jeremy assigns to it. Our companion overview of the LDS position on evolution lays out the range of faithful options in more detail.

6. The Church’s Own Schools Teach the Science

If the Church required young-earth creationism, its universities would teach it. They do not. Brigham Young University’s biology and geology departments teach mainstream evolutionary science and an ancient earth, and the university’s Board of Trustees — composed of General Authorities — approved a packet, “Evolution and the Origin of Man,” that reprints the relevant First Presidency statements and affirms that the Church has taken no official position on the method of man’s physical creation. The 1992 Encyclopedia of Mormonism, produced under Church auspices, says the same. This, too, is part of the pre-2013 record Jeremy could have consulted.

Verdict

Resolved: The fossil record and Neanderthal DNA are real, and nothing in this response disputes them. What the CES Letter gets wrong is the target. “No death before the Fall,” read as binding young-earth doctrine, is a position the First Presidency explicitly declined to require of members in 1931, that apostolic geologists and scientists publicly rejected without censure, and that the Church’s own scriptures — read for what they claim — do not assert. Jeremy reached his contradiction only by choosing the one reading the Church had already set aside, over the covenant reading that the published record, the scriptural text, and a century of faithful scholarship all support. That is the weaker path, taken with the stronger evidence in view.

Genuinely (and only mildly) open: Precisely how Adam relates to the wider hominid lineage, and where exactly to draw the line between Edenic and mortal creation, remain unrevealed. Faithful Latter-day Saints differ, and the Church wisely leaves room. An unrevealed detail is not a contradiction — it is simply an invitation to keep seeking “by study and also by faith.” For the parallel question of how LDS scripture handles the deep past of the earth, see our treatment of Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel.

Further Study