What was there first: the chicken parent(s), or the egg child?

No. Changes and mutations over millions of years are so subtle and microscopic that there is never suddenly one full human from a generation that wasn’t human. It doesn’t work like that. But supposing it could happen like that, then of course it would start off a zygote, then a fetus, then a baby.

You know you were made from clay, right?

STARDUST RAGGY!!!

@ragingloli I know, I’m talking about all you guys and gals.

I wasn’t made from mud….

Right, you were made from a rib.

Nuh uh!

The parent came first. A child can’t be had without one.

Proto-humans created a fertilized and mutated-into-a-human egg.

So, egg first.

And the parent can not create a child that is a different species from themselves.

Aren’t we, in a way, parenting different species, if changes occur in every generation, be they subtle and microscopic.
For all we know, in 100.000 years we could’ve evolved into huphins.

Yes, actually, @Dutchess_III, they can. The mutations that cause the traits that define the start of a new species (however minute the differences are) are carried by the reproductive cells within the bodies of the prot-species parents.

Imagine, as you mentioned elsewhere, that we will indeed evolve into humolphins over the next 100k years (it would take a lot longer, but we’ll roll with it). What are the characteristics of humolphins? Let’s just take three easy ones: tail flukes, blowholes, long snouts. Now, starting today, which person in the world is the closest to being a humolphin? Or, which person in the world will have a great-great-...- grandson who is the first humolphin?

It doesn’t work that way, and not simply because evolutionary change happens so slowly. Consider: someone in the world right now has a more protruding jaw than anyone else—anticipating a long snout. Another person has a longer tailbone—anticipating a fluke. Another person has higher nostrils than anyone else, anticipating them moving all the way to the top of their head.

The entire population of humans evolves together; there can never be a first humolphin, because the traits are being introduced into the gene pool one at a time, by many different people. You look around now and see people who are the same species as you. Your grandfather saw people the same species as himself. Go back 500k years, to your 25000-great-grandpa: he saw people the same pre-human species as himself. And so with every generation: everyone will be surrounded by people of the same species. And the population of pre-humans in the world evolved all together toward human-ness.

So there never was a first human, and there never even was a first human-like animal.

Also note that this applies to any species, not just humans. Where it gets really crazy is when you go back to the beginning of life. There was no first life, because attributes of life were being added to the “pre-gene pool” the same way. No single non-living chemical process gave rise to the “first” living chemical process. The non-living processes evolved all together, as a population, just like we do.

Necessarily, the first human had to have been born from a non-human. The first human also had to be a child before it could be an adult of reproductive age. Therefore, the first human child necessarily predates the first human parent.