Whence God?

Since this is the atheists' version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, there is obviously no place for God in the painting. However we can hardly contemplate a painting based on one so famous without reference to the iconic central panel of God creating Adam. Fortunately a perfect substitute for God has been suggested in the form of our earliest consestor. Consestor is the term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Ancestor's Tale" for the earliest common ancestor of different lines of species.

According to Dawkins our first consestor, that is to say our nearest, chronologically speaking, common ancestor is the individual who was mother to both our lineage and that of the chimpanzees and gorillas. This individual lived around six to seven million years ago and while there is no firm fossil evidence that gives exact detail of what she would have looked like there is sufficient evidence of chimpanzee/homo fossils from around this period for us to have a stab at the appearance of our "Eve". In any event there is more evidence for our Eve than Michaelangelo had for his God!

So while we have the figure to replace God we are still not sure who should replace the Adam figure in the central scene, or indeed whether this should be a single individual, or even if it should be a real or fictional figure. Could it be argued that the archetype of humankind could be represented by a single fictional figure? say Homer Simpson. Do you have a better idea?

Note: While we are to have a single consestor, Dawkins is careful to point out that in fact there was not a single "mother" but rather a number of individuals, spread over a long period of time, who carried the genes from which both we and the chimpanzee/ gorilla linage evolved