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Nahmanides (Ramban) who lived from 1194 - c. 1270 discussed Genesis using terms that we think of today as being evolution.

Ramban first discuses Genesis 1:1. What G-d brought forth thereis something called hailei, what medieval scientists thought of as the raw matter whence all life emerges.

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It is possible that the name earth mentioned in the first verse already contains a hint that a force which causes things to grow should spring up from the earth, and it was from this force that the foundations of all vegetations according to their kinds emanated. Ramban, (Nachmanides), Commentary on the Torah,

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Genesis 1:1 reports G-ds root decision to create something out of nothing; after that, life developed however the scientists describe it.

Genesis 1:2, the very next line, describes primeval earth as tohu vavohu. Tohu, says Ramban, means astonishment, and vavohu means because there was something there astonishment, that is, because out of nothing came something but not yet anything in particular. G-d could have created everything in all its detail with a snap of the divine fingers, but G-d didnt, and therein lies the significance of Genesis 1:1. G-d created the possibility of being, an act that astonishes (Genesis 1:2) because aboriginal emptiness had become primal matter, ready to be shaped and reshaped ad infinitum.

So here you have a VERY Orthodox Jew who is one of the most respected of our sages speaking in terms of evolution who lived in the 12th century of the common era.

I suggest you read The Age of the Universe written by UriYosef's friend, Gerald Schroeder. Gerald Shroeder's book is definitely worth reading. "Genesis and the Big Bang."

Aish also had an article on this subject entitled "Did Adam Have Parents?" It isn't on their website any more but I found it via "The Wayback Machine" which caches the internet.

Here is the link

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Though the number of fossils attributed to Homo habilis and Homo erectus are few and incomplete, by the time we reach strata of 50,000 years ago, we find enough Cro-Magnon fossils to fill museums. And they do. The Cro-Magnon fossil is in essence an exact match of the modern human skeleton, including cranial capacity and shape. The scientific publications that discuss these fossils and the artifacts associated with them, are not based on the machinations of a few demented scientists. Evidence is overwhelming for the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, weaving 9,000 years ago, pottery 8,000 years ago, cave paintings 10 to 30 thousand years ago. To deny their existence is counter productive from a theological stance.

But there is no need to deny them, provided we believe that the biblical insights brought by Onkelos, the Talmud, Rashi, Maimonides and Nachmanides are valid.

The first objection to investigating the possibility that Adam had an ancestor is temporal. Agriculture 10,000 years ago? I thought the world is 5762 years old as of Rosh HaShana, September 2001. Where are the missing years? In Leviticus Rabba (29:1) and elsewhere we are told that all agree, Rosh HaShana commemorates the creation of the soul of Adam; that the Six days of Genesis are not included in the years of the calendar. Yet the Talmud (Hagigah 12A) and Rashi, based on the verse "And there was evening and there was morning day one" (Gen. 1:5), inform us that the days of Genesis are 24 hours each, right from "day one." If they are 24 hours each, why exclude these six 24 days from the rest of the 24 hour days that follow Adam? Nachmanides tells us why: because these days contain all the ages and all the secrets of the universe (commentary on Ex. 21:2 and Lev. 25:2). It took Einstein's discovery of the relativity of time to solve the seeming paradox of how the ages of the universe could pass in six 24-hour days. Viewing the creation from today, looking back in time from the perspective of our very large universe, the universe appears 10 to 20 billion years old. Looking forward in time as does Genesis chapter one, viewing the universe from a time when its scale was 1012 times smaller than today (ref. 1), that is, from the start of "day one," the universe looks a mere six days old. That's the nature of time in a world where the laws of relativity are part of the laws of nature. "The standard interpretation of the redshift [the stretching of radiation wave length and the concurrent lowering of that radiation's frequency] as an effect of the expansion of the universe predicts that the same redshift factor applies to observed rates of occurrence of distant events . . . even when the epoch is so early the redshift cannot be observed in detected radiation" (refs. 2, 3). So the time is there for 10,000-year-old agriculture and 30,000-year-old cave paintings. The question is do these ancient, pre-Adam inventions threaten the Torah view of our origins?

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(snip) Follow the link to read the rest of the article.

Correct. There is nothing in the Torah that is in conflict with the theory of evolution.

Aka contradiction in terms.

There is no contradiction between creation in the Torah and evolution. So Torah does not go against the theory of evolution (in general. Theories change and some scientists believe evolution was entirely random without any intelligence and this does conflict with Torah which tells us there is a creator -- but a majority of scientists do believe that there is intelligence behind evolution).

בחיי בן אשר of the 13th century stated that the universe was billions of years old. This was LONG before Darwin. It is primarily fundamentalist evangelical Chrstians reading translations of the Jewish bible who don't believe in evolution. There are some Jews who believe that evolution is incompatible with the Torah, but a majority of sages would disagree (Rambam, Ramban, Ibn Ezra) as does the American Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) which writes that "evolutionary theory, properly understood, is not incompatible with belief in a Divine Creator, nor with the first 2 chapters of Genesis."