It’s a story that almost any Christian would be instantly familiar with.
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman on Earth.
Said to be made out of dust and to have lived in the Garden of Eden, the two figures are central to the belief that everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors.
While this might seem far-fetched, there is now a growing body of evidence which suggests that at least some parts of the story could be true.
Archaeologists have found surprising signs that Eden was not only a real place but could have been the birthplace of civilisation as we know it.
Likewise, biologists have shown that all humans alive today really do share a single common ancestor.
However, making the Bible fit with modern science requires throwing out a lot of the traditional story.
That could mean saying goodbye to the notion that God created Adam and Eve, or even questioning whether our biblical ancestors were Homo Sapiens.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve live in a place called the Garden of Eden, a beautiful land of plenty and abundance.
Interestingly, the Bible also provides a relatively precise description of where this mystical garden is located.
In Genesis, the Bible states that a river flows through Eden and divides into four branches: The Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.
Of these, the Tigris and the Euphrates are well known and still flow through modern-day Iraq.
However, the Gihon and the Pishon are far more obscure and their locations, if they still exist, are unknown.
This has led to a plethora of suggestions as to where the Garden of Eden might have really been, ranging from Iran and Mongolia to Jackson County Missouri.
However, the most promising theory is that the Garden of Eden is located in an area called Mesopotamia.
Literally meaning ‘between rivers’ in Ancient Greek, this region sits between the Tigris and Euphrates and straddles what is now eastern Syria, northwestern Turkey, and most of Iraq.
Professor Eric Cline, a classical and biblical archaeologist from George Washington University, argues that this theory matches the scriptural and archaeological evidence.
Writing in his book ‘From Eden to Exile’, Professor Cline says: ‘This makes some sense from a textual point of view, because not only does the biblical account say that the garden lay “in the east”, meaning to the east of Israel, but it also mentions the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in connection with the Garden of Eden.’
Additionally, this region is widely believed to be the place where the first plants and animals were domesticated between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago in the so-called Neolithic revolution.
Dubbed the ‘Fertile Crescent’, the nutrient-rich sediments of the two rivers allowed for the first grains to be deliberately planted and harvested by humans
This development led to the earliest transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural lifestyles and precipitated the birth of the first permanent human settlements.
Professor Cline adds: ‘This area may have also become somewhat of an agricultural paradise for the local residents following the invention of irrigation during the fourth millennium BC.’
Further strengthening this case, there are some striking parallels between the biblical account of creation and the most ancient myths from the region.
