Did Adam and Eve Have Humanoid Company?

The Church has no definitive position on this question. What the Church does teach, though not infallibly, is that Adam and Eve were a real human pair from which all of the human race descended (Humani Generis, 37).

With that said, the scientific evidence would seem to give plausibility to the theory that other creatures with a similar biological makeup to humans would have been existing at the time of our first parents. Such creatures would not have been “soulless,” since they would have been living beings.

Remember that according to the Aristotelian-Thomistic view (the view of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas), the soul is simply the animating principle of a body. It is that which makes something a living being. Given that there are different kinds of living beings, such as plants, animals, and humans, there are different types of souls. The type of soul that the highly sentient creatures living among Adam and Eve would have had would have been a sensory soul, the type of soul that is ontologically superior to the vegetative soul of plants but ontologically inferior to the rational soul of humans.