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.
A Real Garden of Eden
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.
Most notably the ancient Sumerians, considered to be the first human civilisation, recorded a myth called Enuma Elish, meaning ‘When on High’.
This story records the creation of heaven and Earth from a primal, chaotic body of water in a very similar fashion to that described in Genesis.
According to some archaeologists, the best way to explain this similarity is that the Sumerian myth was handed down through the years all the way to the Israelites in the second century BC.
If that is true, then it is plausible that the biblical story of Adam and Eve captures an ancient story about the origin of civilisation which took place somewhere around modern-day Iran.
A Genetic Adam and Eve
It might come as a surprise to learn that scientists really do believe that all living humans are descended from a single woman.
The so-called ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is the common female ancestor to which the DNA of all modern human beings can be traced.
This common ancestor exists because, no matter how big your initial population is, the chances are that most female lineages will eventually come to an end.
While Mitochondrial Eve was not the first human, every other female lineage eventually died off and failed to pass on their mitochondrial DNA – a type of genetic material passed from mothers to their children.
Likewise, by applying the same logic scientists have determined that there must also be a ‘Y-chromosome Adam’ from which the male Y-chromosome in every living human originates.
Since DNA gathers mutations at a steady rate, scientists can use this ‘genetic clock’ to figure out how long ago everyone had the same DNA.
In 1987, geneticists looked at the mitochondrial DNA of 147 people from around the world.
By comparing the differences in their DNA, the researchers could work out how many mutations must have occurred since their most recent common ancestor.
Dividing that number by the rate of mutation shows that Mitochondrial Eve probably lived in Africa around 200,000 years ago.
Likewise, a study conducted in 2013 with 1,200 men from Sardinia also showed that Y-chromosome Adam would have lived around 180,000–200,000 years ago.
Of course, no scientists actually believe that humans descended from a single pair of humans.
This Adam and Eve would have been just one of the many humans living on Earth at the time.
Our two most recent common ancestors likely lived hundreds if not thousands of years apart and almost certainly never met – let alone had children together.
Their unique status as humanity’s common ancestors is merely a product of statistics rather than any divine intervention.
A Genealogical Story
However, some scientists believe that there is a way of making science fit with a biblical account of Adam and Eve.
Dr Joshua Swamidass, a biologist from Washington University, has argued that there is no reason to believe that humanity does not descend from a single couple.
As the case of the Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam shows, there is no scientific barrier to humans having a common ancestor even if the population never reduced to a single couple.
In an article, published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Dr Swamidass writes: ‘Many individuals are each individually ancestors of “all the living”.
‘All humans alive descend from each of these universal ancestors. The same can be said for all alive in AD 1, or all alive when recorded history begins.
‘Two of them could be a particular couple, named Adam and Eve in scripture, from whom we all descend.’
It is important to note that Dr Swamidass is not offering a positive case for the existence of Adam and Eve.
Rather, he is merely showing that there is nothing in our understanding of evolutionary biology that prohibits the existence of an Adam and Eve couple.
Yet, as Dr Swamidass notes, there is still the problem that Homo Sapiens were not the first humans on Earth.
Based on the idea that Adam and Eve should be the literal ancestors of every human who has ever lived, some scholars have looked even further into the past.
Professor William Lane Craig, a philosopher from Houston Christian University, argues that Adam and Eve must have been the first people to truly be human.
Using criteria including the capacity for abstract thought, depth of planning, technological innovation, and the use of symbols, he argues that the first true humans emerged much earlier than homo sapiens.
In an article published in First Things, Professor Craig writes: ‘Adam and Eve may plausibly be identified as belonging to the last common ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, usually denominated Homo heidelbergensis.
‘Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago, a conclusion consistent with the evidence of population genetics.’
Although there is nothing impossible about this claim, it doesn’t put forward much positive evidence.
Even if Homo Heidelbergensis is the first human and humans could have descended from a single pair, there is still no reason to believe that this pair were the only humans on Earth.
Additionally, if Adam were a Homo Heidelbergensis then he wouldn’t have lived in the proposed location for the Garden of Eden in Iraq.
Likewise, admitting that Adam and Eve weren’t even Homo Sapiens is likely to rattle a few more conservative Christian thinkers.
Additionally, some scientists have criticised the idea that ‘humanness’ is a binary characteristic with a simple starting point.
However, it is still a striking fact that there is nothing in our current theories of human evolution that strictly prohibits the existence of an original Adam and Eve couple in at least some sense.