Help me answer this

[IslaMann]

From DD(3) :" You know humans have babies. Well, who had the first baby?"

Help me answer in a non religious way please. No Adam and Eve nonsense.

I tried explaining evolution but made a lousy job of it, and she keeps asking the question.

There's no record of who had the first baby
Either that or tell her you did and there she is!

Ah, chicken and egg question! Simply say it is too far in the past to know. It's true, has nothing to do with religion, so it's a winner surely?

There would be a possibility of answering this question more accurately but it would take someone who is postgrad in this field and has studied it to explain in simple but understandable terms.

I'd go with what's already been suggested. But I really want to know myself, now.

Here’s a simple animation of the progress of evolution:

So tell her at some point when apes were evolving into what we now understand as humans, a baby would have been born which we would now recognise as human. But it is impossible to say exactly when - but during that period.

"Nobody knows, it was a very, very, very long time ago" should do the trick.

I'd say it was so long ago that nobody knows.

As for evolution, I'd go for a very simplistic approach to start off with. Something like -
A long long time ago there weren't any people, there were only monkeys. One day one of the monkeys had a baby, and the baby monkey had less hair than the other monkeys, and its tail was a little bit shorter.
The baby monkey grew up and had babies of its own, and they had less hair too, and their tails were shorter. The monkeys decided to stop living in trees and live in caves instead as that suited them better with their shorter tails. Then their babies had even less hair, and even shorter tails because they didn't need tails to hold on to branches any more, and the caves were warm so they didn't need lots of hair to keep them warm.
A long time went by and when the monkeys had their babies the babies had less and less hair, and shorter and shorter tails. Eventually the babies only had hair on their head, and little eyebrows over their eyes, and they had no tails at all! And those were the first humans.

Thank you. Some great answers. Why do little ones ask such complicated questions?

Because they have imaginations that aren’t stifled by the mundane drudgery and problems in life that older people have

greenlobster has a reasonable explanation (except that we didn't evolve from monkeys in quite that way) but it would go way over the head of a 3-year-old.