Here are my thoughts on the topic.
Starting with Adam:
Romans 9:5
Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised.
In Genesis 2:7
The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath or life, and the man became a living being (other translations says living soul).
Strong’s Concordance 5315 soul is nephesh, definition, a soul, living being, life, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion. The inner being of a man...continuing with "living being” in Strong’s is the word "chay" and it is an adjective, feminine, noun, meaning alive, living...of man, a living man.
NEXT COMPARE:
In Genesis 1:26 we read...Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (The Neanderthal were hunter gatherers? They were not tilling the ground yet)
It is still the same creation event but in Genesis 2 we get told in greater detail how He did it, He breathed life into his nostrils.
I believe that Adam received Gods spirit, received knowledge of good and evil, ate the forbidden fruit (having an understanding, learning contrasts), started tilling the ground, using tools,
becoming smart (smarter that the Neanderthals?)
They found skeletons older that 300 000 years old, fossils found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. There were certainly other living beings before Adam was breathed life into. The difference is that from Adam onwards, we follow Christs ancestry.
These were human beings who lived without having the knowledge of God (the forbidden fruit) but they had a desire to worship something, I.e. the sun, the moon, the stars etc. Because now one is without excuse to believe in a higher being by what is visible by what we see in nature and around us.
It is in our DNA to want to believe in something bigger than us. In
Romans 1:20 we read, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse"
Love
Heidi