Was Adam really the first man, according to the Bible?

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Look, I think the Bible suggests that Adam really was the first man. I think Adam is supposed to, in some sense, but the father of the human race, in order for Original Sin to apply to all those folks. I think that Genesis can be seen allegorically, however, I think that this interpretive path is kind of cut off by the reading of Genesis given by the New Testament, as it does tend to suggest that Adam is real, that he is the first man, and ties Adam back to Jesus. I am not a scholar on the NT though, so that can create some difficulty, but it is a common evangelical claim that without Adam, the atonement of Christ makes no sense.

Adam was an ancestor of Noah. All other humans were killed in the flood. Ergo, the taint of original sin whether or not Adam was the first man.

Was Adam really the first man, according to the Bible? - Maybe the first man was God, not Adam. After all, God was the (male) landlord of the Garden of Paradise.

Yeah but he has a few more years of civilization to help him.

It helped that Tolkien was the only one writing Tolkien - and even then, the tone of The Hobbit doesn't match the tone of The Lord of the Rings, which in turn isn't written in the same fashion as The Silmarillion or Farmer Giles of Ham. The Torah (and its later spinoffs, the Bible and the Qu'ran) started off as oral tradition, handed down without a system of writing for generations. It is speculated that the first five books of the Torah and the Bible, known as the Pentateuch, were in fact first written down by Moses, which may account for his being such a Mary Sue figure. However, they were later translated and retranslated and reretranslated, to the point where any historical facts have been completely obscured by later authors' own sociopolitical agendas.

Later books had many other authors - who may or may not have been "sustained by divine revelation", but who were in the final analysis human, and thus prone to error and exaggeration...

(Incidentally, it is my understanding that YHVH's use of the first person plural when referring to Himself was introduced during European translations, and may have been an example of the "Royal We".)

EDIT: Chadmaster, that's not "a theory", unless you can posit some mechanism by which a differing atmosphere could possibly extend life; that's an example of what TVTropes.org refers to as A Wizard Did It. No logical explanation, just "He made it that way!" Which is an argument that completely rejects logic and science, and denies that it is even possible to ever understand what's going on. (And that leads into the question, if the Lord never intended for us to use these huge brains to figure out the world, why did He give them to us? Are we now to accuse the Almighty of incompetence in our design?)