Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing". IIRC there's some "people in a few places ate oats and seasonal nomads might have helped spread the seeds" evidence around 30kya, and then the real agricultural revolution isn't until tens of thousands of years later still ... and not too surprisingly so. Modern technology is amazing stuff, but I still spare some respect for the cultures who gradually figured out that they could become numerous and well-fed by figuring out how to breed and process and eat massive amounts of grass seeds.
I think that's very much the historical consensus, in part because it sidesteps the "how much of Genesis was directly worded by Moses vs written based on intact oral tradition vs written from the point of view of much later writers" question by having been a cultural dividing line for centuries. The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone would have been enough to set up legends forever, but would surely have died down as a contemporary cultural division, except that there's a lot of marginal land there that wasn't suitable for irrigation, so there was always a subpopulation of pastoralists living around the farmers. It's kind of reassuring that the canonical tale passed down to us was just "the first horrible person was one of Their Team" and not "Their Team are all horrible people".
Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm never super sure how seriously to take even our best date estimates for [thing], in part because they keep getting shifted around. I have a friend who works in a geology-related field, and he says dating is heavily reliant on assumptions, too. I certainly don't think we have enough geological evidence to rule out "a farm" 100kya, but it does look like you're correct that farming is believed to be much much more recent than, say, stone tools.
But I brought it up more as an example of the sort of thing I find interesting to toy around with, not (obviously) a systematic and well-thought-out theory I have.
Wouldn't the Egyptians also be agriculturalists by the standards of the time? My understanding is that the Creation myth in Genesis is thought by some to be essentially a refutation of the pagan creation myths the Israelites were likely familiar with, and it makes me wonder if the Israelites saw the Egyptians in Cain.
(Although interestingly one could argue that Egypt is portrayed fairly positively in Genesis.)
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