Where Was the Garden of Eden? Scientists are Chasing Bible’s Genesis

The Web is filled with pseudo-scientific gibberish that attempts to prove all manner of ideas and claims but there are also some pretty interesting amateur sites that have attempted to assemble known facts in a fairly articulate and unbiased way. One popular topic among armchair archaeologists and propagandists is the possible location for what may have been the Garden of Eden. In looking for clues to where the Garden of Eden may have been, some people have assembled very convincing arguments favoring a northern Persian Gulf location for a once-inhabited region that closely matched the brief description found in the Biblical Genesis.

Genesis, according to literary critics, was probably compiled in the 8th Century BCE and may have been drawn from four older sources. Contrary to popular misconception, Genesis does not claim to have been written by Moses. The books that Moses wrote are named in the Bible but there are no books included in Biblical compilations that match the titles attributed to Moses. Hence, scholarly arguments that Genesis does not date from the time of Moses don’t actually conflict with the Biblical claims about Moses’ authorship of various books.

These facts, of course, haven’t prevented generations of church leaders from attributing the first five books in the Bible to Moses but such claims have led people to doubt the veracity of many Biblical events, places, and descriptions. Archaeologists have, in fact, used the Bible to interpret many of their findings in the Middle East for as much as a 100 years — thus offering considerable vindication for many Biblical stories and anecdotes even going back as far as Genesis. But the most elusive Biblical story for science has been the tale of a garden where man became a living soul — where God established his special relationship with Man through Adam.

A recent news story about a theoretical lost civilization under the Persian Gulf has stirred hope in the hearts of the legions of Biblicalists who want to find some proof that Eden existed. The northern Persian Gulf fits the Biblical description for several reasons, including verifiable remnants of two ancient rivers (besides the still-existing Tigris and Euphrates) that match the few details we have about the Pison and Gihon rivers.

According to geological and archaeological studies, the Persian Gulf appears to have been flooded around 8,000 years ago (approximately 6,000 BCE) — which, geographically speaking, is near to the same time when Walter Pitman and others suggest the Black Sea was flooded. Formerly a fresh water “lake”, the Black Sea may once have been surrounded by Neolithic villages and farms that would have been wiped out in what Pitman and others believe was a flood that could have given rise to the story of Noah and his Ark.

Although the Black Sea theory fits some of the facts in Noah’s story, it’s rather far north for a Noahnic placement. The Persian Gulf actually makes more sense in several ways. For one thing, Noah could have been warned about an impending flood simply by visiting the seawall that formerly protected what is the Persian Gulf from the Indian Ocean — or someone who had witnessed the erosion could have told him. Archaeology has confirmed that there was a massive inundation throughout the Mesopotamian region several thousand years ago — so we know that the floodwaters that wiped out whatever lay in the lowlands were carried farther inland than the Persian Gulf now extends.

Some linguists, as far back as the 1940s, argued that the Sumerian language (written down in Cuneiform around 3,000 BCE) seems to contain remnants of an older language that was at least 1,000 years more ancient. The idea was widely accepted until the late 1990s, when Gonzalo Rubio threw the entire idea into disarray by ridiculing the previous arguments. Rubio’s position seemed to sway many in the linguistic community.

The Rubio thesis suggests that there were strong ties between Sumerian and other contemporary languages, such that the perceived “remnants” were actually borrowings from more recent languages. As recently as 2008, however, Gordon Whittaker sought to rebuff Rubio’s argument by making a case for a Euphratic language that must have influenced Sumerian and Akkadian.

Although we cannot say that the debate has been settled, we can be sure of one thing: Sumerian is NOT the most ancient of human languages. For example, just recently a 65,000 year-old language called Bo just vanished with the death of its last fluent speaker. So logic dictates that we conclude Sumerian must have evolved from an older language at some point.

The debate over the age and authenticity of certain Sumerian words has been linked to the debate concerning the age and origin of the Indo-European peoples. Some experts hold that the Indo-European peoples can only be attested to a period of about 4-5,000 years ago with the appearance of wheeled carts in the Asian steppes; others argue that the Indo-European peoples may have originated around 7-8,500 years ago in Anatolia (what is now Turkey) and the Aegean area.

The latter theory of course supports the idea that Indo-European peoples could have had contact with the Sumerians on the assumption that a group of IE peoples was somehow drawn down toward the Mesopotamian area about the time that farming began to spread to Europe. Around 8,000 BCE a fishing culture arose in what is known as the Green Sahara — northern Africa’s Sahara desert region, which was then lush and fertile. These ancient peoples — called Kiffians — were eventually replaced by a culture known as the Tenerians. The Tenerians herded animals and worked with more sophisticated tools and pottery than the Kiffians.

Eventually as the Sahara dried up the Tenerians vanished, abandoning their ancient homelands by sometime around 2500 BCE. Shifting weather patterns throughout this timeframe reflect the global climate changes that occurred as the last glaciation period ended. As the Earth warmed up the great glaciers of Europe and North America retreated northward and sea-levels rose. The North Sea is said to have reclaimed the land bridge between Britain and mainland Europe between 7,000 and 6,000 BCE — close to the time that the Persian Gulf is thought to have been flooded.

We now believe that Middle Eastern farmers probably entered southeastern Europe around 7,500 years ago — about 5,500 BCE. The arrival of agriculturalists seems to have set off a millennia-long conflict between farmers and hunter-gatherers across Europe that culminated in the spread of agriculture all the way to Ireland and Scotland by the 1st Millennium BCE.

As scientists now speculate there may have been a conflict between hunter-gatherers (or herdsmen) and farmers in the presumed Persian Gulf region that has been preserved in the story of Adam and Eve and their two sons (Cain and Abel), it seems that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to show that a series of major geologic and climactic events could have sent human populations into migrations that resulted in chain reactions of invasions.

There is almost enough evidence to suggest the cycle repeated itself about once every 1,000-1,200 years — a cycle that was observed among Neolithic peoples in western Europe who underwent radical cultural upheavals. As floodwaters pushed tribes out what became the Persian Gulf, Black Sea, and North Sea the resulting conflicts must have shifted balances of power in several ways. Any successful innovation that resulted in a change in the status quo could have significant consequences across centuries.

Hence, let us alter our model of agriculturalists-versus-hunter-gatherers to encompass three types of cultures: the more ancient hunter-gatherers, the pastoralists, and the agriculturalists. Each culture would have shared similarities with the others. Hunter-gatherers and pastoralists would not have required permanent settlements but they would have held territorial prerogatives. Agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers would have built permanent or semi-permanent structures that eventually gave rise to centers of religious influence.

The pastoralists would have remained on the fringes of civilization. The hunter-gatherers could not withstand the superior weapons and technologies of the agriculturalists and so became slaves or subservient populations. The agriculturalists built the cities and expanded faster than the other two groups.

However, it could also be there was a fourth type of culture found along the shorelines of all the navigable seas: fisher peoples who developed seafaring capabilities. In fact, science has determined that ancient humans may have been crossing the Mediterranean sea as long as 100,000 years ago.

Coastal peoples might have co-existed peacefully with both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists through trade. In fact, trade between different groups of humans seems to be attested as far back as 110,000 years ago — so some sea snail shells found hundreds of miles inland would indicate.

There should be no doubt about contacts between prehistoric peoples from very different cultures. We can document changes in settlement patterns and movements of peoples through DNA, archaeology, and linguistic analysis. The emerging picture suggests that modern humans began expanding outward from southern Africa around 60,000 years ago and that with each major climactic event changes in landscape and the availability in food probably forced small groups of people to innovate, to change location, and probably to look for aid from other groups.

The pattern repeated itself endlessly. Humans may have settled in what became the Persian Gulf, flourished for a few thousand years, and then moved on. Perhaps the elusive origins of agriculture lie buried beneath the waves of the salty waters of the Gulf today. Maybe mankind’s first major war was fought over lands that can no longer be inhabited.

Survivors of the flooded lands carried remnants of their cultures to higher lands, started over, and passed on the tales and traditions of their ancestors. Maybe most of the mythologies we have inherited all look back to the crucial period ranging from 8,000 – 5,000 BCE. Neolithic culture flourished and expanded rapidly during these millennia. By the year 5,000 BCE the world would have been very different from what people living around 8,000 BCE had known. A new age in human experience was about to begin.

Mankind finally, at last stood upon the threshold of what should be called Current History — the time in which we have recorded our deeds, our dreams, and our aspirations.