The origin of man is a mystery. Even Darwin's theory is not considered fully proven, due to the absence of transitional links in evolution. How else do people explain their appearance from ancient times to the present day.
Totemism
Totemism belongs to the most ancient mythological concepts and is considered the first form of awareness of the human collective, as well as its place in nature. Totemism taught that each group of people had their own ancestor - a totem animal or plant. For example, if a raven serves as a totem, then it is the actual progenitor of the clan, and each raven is a relative. In this case, the totem animal is only a patron, but is not deified, unlike later creationism.
Androgynous
The mythological one can be attributed to the ancient Greek version of the origin of man from the Androgyne - the first people who combined the characteristics of both sexes. Plato in the dialogue "Feast" describes them as beings with a spherical body, whose back did not differ from the chest, with four arms and legs and two identical faces on their heads. According to legend, our ancestors were not inferior to the titans in strength and skill. Puffed up, they decided to overthrow the Olympians, for which they were cut in half by Zeus. This reduced their strength and self-confidence in half.
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Androgyny is not unique to Greek mythology. The idea that man and woman were originally one whole is close to many world religions. So, in one of the Talmudic interpretations of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, it is said that Adam was created androgynous.
Abrahamic tradition
Three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) go back to the Abrahamic religions, going back to Abraham - the patriarch of the Semitic tribes, the first person who believed in the Lord. According to the Abrahamic tradition, the world was created by God - Existing from Nothingness, literally “from nothing”. God also created man - Adam from the dust of the earth “in our image and likeness”, so that man could be truly good. It should be noted that both in the Bible and in the Koran, the creation of man is mentioned more than once. For example, in the Bible about the creation of Adam it is first said in the 1st chapter that God created man “out of nothing in his own image and likeness,” in the 2nd chapter, that he created him from dust (dust).
Hinduism
In Hinduism, there are at least five versions of the creation of the world and man, respectively. In Brahmanism, for example, the creator of the world is the god Brahma (in later versions he is identified with Vishnu and the Vedic deity Prajapati), who emerged from a golden egg floating in the world's ocean. He grew and sacrificed himself, created from his hair, skin, meat, bones and fat five elements of the world - earth, water, air, fire, ether - and five steps of the sacrificial altar. Gods, people and other living beings were created from him. Thus, in Brahmanism, by offering sacrifices, people recreate Brahma.
But according to the Vedas - the ancient scripture of Hinduism, the creation of the world and man is shrouded in darkness: “Who truly knows, who will proclaim here. Where was it born, where did this creation come from? Further, the gods (appeared) through the creation of this (world).
So who knows where it came from?"
Kabbalah
According to the Kabbalistic teaching, the creator Ein Soph created a soul that was named Adam Rishon - “the first man”. It was a structure consisting of many separate desires, linked together like the cells of our body. All desires were in harmony, since initially the desire to support each other was laid in each of them. However, being at the highest spiritual level, similar to the creator, Adam received a huge spiritual light, which is equivalent to the “forbidden fruit” in Christianity. Unable to achieve the goal of creation by this action alone, the primary soul split into 600,000 thousand parts, and each of them into many more parts. All of them are now in the souls of people. Through many circuits, they must carry out "correction" and re-assemble into a common spiritual complex called Adam. In other words,after the “breaking” or fall, all these particles are not equal to each other. But returning to their original state, they again reach the same level, where they are all equal.
Evolutionary creationism
As science advanced, creationists had to compromise with natural science concepts. The intermediate stage between the theory of creation and Darwinism was "theistic evolutionism." Evolutionary theologians do not reject evolution, but consider it a tool in the hands of God the creator. Simply put, God created the "material" for the emergence of man - the genus Homo and launched the process of evolution. The result is a man. An important point of evolutionary creationism is that although the body changed, the human spirit remained unchanged. This is the position that the Vatican has officially adhered to since the time of Pope John Paul II (1995): God created an ape-like creature, putting an immortal soul into it. In classical creationism, man has not changed in body or soul since creation.
The theory of ancient astronauts
In the XX century, the version about the extraterrestrial origin of man was popular. One of the founders of the idea of paleocontact in the 1920s was Tsiolkovsky, who announced the possibility of aliens visiting the earth. According to the theory of paleocontact, sometime in the distant past, around the Stone Age, aliens visited the Earth for some business. Either they were interested in the colonization of exoplanets, or the resources of the Earth, or it was their transfer base, but one way or another, some of their descendants settled on Earth. They may have even mixed with the native genus Homo, and modern humans are mestizo alien lifeforms and aborigines on Earth.
The main arguments on which the supporters of this theory rely are the complexity of the technologies used in the construction of ancient monuments, as well as geoglyphs, petroglyphs and other drawings of the ancient world, which supposedly depict alien ships and people in spacesuits. Mates Agres - one of the founders of the theory of the Paleovisites, even claimed that the biblical Sodom and Gomor were destroyed not by God's wrath, but by a nuclear explosion.
Darwinism
The famous postulate - man descended from a monkey, is usually attributed to Charles Darwin, although the scientist himself, remembering the fate of his predecessor Georges Louis Buffon, who was laughed at at the end of the 18th century for such ideas, cautiously expressed that humans and monkeys must have some common ancestor, ape-like creature.
According to Darwin's own version, the genus homo originated somewhere around 3.5 million in Africa. It was not yet our fellow tribesman Homo Sapiens, whose age today is dated to about 200 thousand years, and the first representative of the genus homo is a great ape, a hominid. In the course of evolution, he began to walk on two legs, use his hands as a tool of labor, he began to progressively transform the brain, articulate speech and sociality. Well, the reason for evolution, like all other species, was natural selection, not God's plan.