Think of the first genetic mutation human, alone, who has no parents since they are genetically very different than him/her.

Maybe the mutant was cast out. (S)he sees no others like him.

And then he's trying to find a mate, but there isn't any!

He mates with the others but considers them to be like "chayat hasadeh"!

And then finally god finds him a mate genetically like him (etzem me'atzami, etc).

Maybe it is one of his own kids, from his matings with the earlier species he was born from. She is genetically human, and he mates with her (even in the Eden story, it is clear that adam/eve's children mated with each other, so this is not an issue when there is literally no-one else, as Lot's daughters thought after the destruction).

...

1. Think of the Eden story as being written after some changes had occurred to human society: "le'ovdo uleshomro" means they had (discovered agriculture and some) became farmers (and of course kayin/hevel represent the hunter-gather/farmer split).

2. Upright walking was already old, but it remained in some sort of memory, and the issue of upright vs non-upright is mirrored in the transition-in-reverse as a punishment for the snake.

3. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge means becoming more intelligent than their forebears.

So the new situation for women re childbirth became children with a larger brain, born from a body geared for upright walking, and a diet based on carbohydrates rather than animal proteins - with all three leading to more dangerous and painful childbirth.

.....

If Neanderthal (or other species) could speak and could converse with humans, that is interesting, but then why is the snake pushing us to become smart? Maybe it was a way to get the gods to kill us off? And the snake is pictured as very sly, and probably had eaten from the tree....so maybe Neanderthal was there before we came on the scene, and was jealous that we went beyond him, as is the case in Genesis with all older/younger pairs, but in this case we the younger usurper killed our older brother. Then Kayin with animals though not a hunter kills the farmer brother...maybe the rest of Genesis-history we need to work that off by having it happen in reverse? and of course Esav is a hunter..

maybe there was competition/war between older species like Neanderthal etc, and even non-fully-erect species, and they hated the smart erect farmers, and cursed them, and all this is remembered in various ways, by our taunt that considered them not erect but crawling, and the reverse taunt that for farmers the earth will give forth "kotz vedardar", which never was a problem for hunters. And maybe snakes and scorpions etc which bit (hu yeshufcha rosh...) was a problem for all, but the new fangled smart types started to wear shoes and the curse of the others was that it wouldn;t help.. Oh yeah, you uprights consider us hunched people as belly-crawlers, ok, so we'll bite you...

all this is somewhat fanciful and not thought-out, and in any case it is not clear that the story relfects anything accurately by the time it was written, and in any case if it was redacted by people who didn;t know the basis it would not be consistent with the actual history, but maybe more thought and more research like in that article will help make sense of it..

..........

I'd like to ask the researchers whether a Neanderthal child born to a human-Neanderthal couple where the mother was human would lead to death of the mother in childbirth because of the skull size, or maybe the reverse is true if energy is a consideration since maybe human brains consume more energy even in the womb?

Maybe if the father is human then the larger pelvis of the Neanderthal mother and her greater feeding capacity could enable her to give birth to a human brain and the pelvis would easily accommodate the head-size.

But if the mother dies would the child die if he was stuck inside or would they cut her open to get the child? maybe humans would do that but not neanderthals (maybe they were not smart enough, or not ruthless enough?)

........

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161221-the-real-reasons-why-childbirth-is-so-painful-and-dangerous

31 שְׁמוֹת

וַיִּתֵּן אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, כְּכַלֹּתוֹ לְדַבֵּר אִתּוֹ בְּהַר סִינַי, שְׁנֵי, לֻחֹת הָעֵדֻת--לֻחֹת אֶבֶן, כְּתֻבִים בְּאֶצְבַּע אֱלֹהִים

Scientifically, the origin of alphabetic writing was perhaps in Sinai around the time that Tradition dates the giving of the ten commandments. And both occured in Sinai.

Maybe the giving of the 10 commandments is a memory of the invention of writing, and the attribution of the 10 commandments to the finger of God is similar to the ideas in various traditions of the origin of fire being from the gods (to Jews writing is as basic - and as deserving of divine origin - as is fire in other cultures).

Maybe like fire came from the gods, writing was first attributed to etzba elokim. ie the people reading these stories when they were originated, understood that it refered to a revolution, the use of alphabetic writing, the emergence of portable documents, and easier to write long megilas.

However there's a mention of writing before the above:

שְׁמוֹת17 כְּתֹב זֹאת זִכָּרוֹן בַּסֵּפֶר

Also: Ex 24; Ex 34.

But maybe the command to write it was given later on, well after the Amalek attack, and maybe in any case it was actually written down only later, so that the first example of writing which was seen by humans was the one executed by God's finger. Whether the action of the writing was seen by Moses or all, or whether only attested to but not witnessed by humans, the tablets with the writing were seen by all.

So it makes sense that the words were spoken by God, since that was necessary before anyone knew how to read the newly-invented writing.

And so maybe that is all tied to the idea that the Alephbet has mystical significance, the universe was created via it, the order is important (gematria), the shapes are significant, the Torah must be written by a special scribe etc.

.............

Wiki: The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet.^[1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.^[2][3]]

Proto-Sinaitic script

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script. The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l bʿlt "... to the Lady"

^{Proto-Sinaitic, .....a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Paleo-Hebrew,[2] Phoenician and South Arabian scripts (and, by extension, of most historical and modern alphabets).}

^{The earliest "Proto-Sinaitic" inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. "The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a late date, around 1550 BC:}

^Below: Proto sinaitics script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ba%60alat.jpg