So many Chrustmas visitors, and so little time…
Personally I don’t feel comfortable about interpretations that rely on God’s injecting hidden information about evolution (or even a far distant early neolithic) into the Mosaic account. The question has to begin with what it meant to the human author under the inspiration of the Spirit, and the interest comes from the fact that it’s such an old account that we can’t take anything for granted - even early Christian or 2nd temple Jewish understandings were far later than the composition.
The traditional interpretation, I guess, begins with the conclusion that Adam should be taken as the first man fron the various hints in the Bible. In that case Gen 2 must be restating or continuing Genesis 1, in which humans were first created - hence the common mediaeval belief (following Irenaeus) that Adam sinned on the afternoon of the day he was created.
The critical scholars, typically, barged in with high explosives and simply said they are two incompatible accounts of creation. Integrating them with each other or with science thereby becomes futile.
But I’ve been thinking through a scenario that centres on Adam’s place as a historically remembered forerunner of Israel’s covenant (and therefore dated both by his cultural and geographic setting, by genalogies, and by the limits of human memory to the Neolithic - I’d favour closer to 3500BC than 10500, but that’s detail that’s possibly unknowable).
The key thereafter is that, just Israel knew itself to be called (via Abraham) out of the human race and for the human race, it makes sense that they saw Adam in a similar role, assumed the existence of a large body of humanity in his time, and that the features of the account that appear to make Adam isolated are literary, not historical.
The writer’s concern in chapter 1 can then be seen as the establishing of God’s sole Creatorship and Deity, and therefore the establishing of his rights over, and concern for, the whole of mankind, on which Genesis 2 and the rest of salvation history depends.
In that understanding, there is no need to map Genesis 1 to evolution at all - “Moses” is talking about the race from which Adam arose, and asserting that people - phenomenologically understood as anyone you meet in your travels - are God’s handiwork, and not only that, but his image in and for the world.
I don’t see it as helpful to think of “the image” as something added to mankind - it is what we are, just as the Mona Lisa was, from start to finish, created as the image of Lisa Gherardini. In the latter case, of course, one could talk about the chemical pigments, the paint etc and compare that with mankind evolved from something else: but the painting was not made into a roughly humanoid shape and then handed to Leonardo to do the face to order. In that sense, it is and always was “in the image and likeness of Lisa,” if Leonardo knew his job.
When Genesis was written, any questions about whether some long-extinct species were, or were not, human, or created in God’s image would have been just as academic as they are for us. We don’t know, and possibly never will, how the human species was brought into being, and how much was by “generation” (providentially) and how much by “creation” (directly). What we do know is that all humanity is of one blood, and all in the image of God: modern genetics confirms that, even as the “established science” of the Out of Africa hypothesis gets a bloody nose from new fossils. Genealogical Adam, of course, confirms close human brotherhood even more dramatically.