Where is the Garden of Eden?

Most people know it as the biblical birthplace of man: The Garden of Eden. But is the Garden of Eden just a story to explain human creation? Or could it be a real place? And if the Garden of Eden did exist... where exactly was it? Some of the possibilities may surprise you. Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Anthony Pin, Dominick Hernández, Esther Hamori, Nile Green, John A. Beck, Nicola Denzey Lewis, S. Joshua Swamidass, and Reza Aslan. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudiosSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

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  Today, the search for the biblical birthplace of man.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  God created Adam and Eve and placed them in this Garden of Eden that no one knows exactly where it's located.

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  Is the Garden of Eden a tale to explain human creation, or could it be a real place?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  The three major Western religious traditions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, all say it existed.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  All the way from Genesis through the Gilgamesh epic for some 4,000 years, we have a memory of a place like Eden.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  If the Garden of Eden did exist, where was it? Now we explore the top theories surrounding the location of this paradise on earth.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Genesis talks about four rivers that come together.

• 0:57Speaker 04

  If we can kind of chart out where those rivers are, maybe we can find out where the Garden of Eden was actually located.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  It only makes sense to turn to this place where humans lived for thousands of years. This is what the book of Genesis is describing. This is where you find the Garden of Eden.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  This is the search for the Garden of Eden.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, where is the Garden of Eden?

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• 2:51Speaker 00

  The first book of the Hebrew Bible is the Book of Genesis. There's no dispute that the word Genesis means "in the beginning," and it tells a story of the creation of the world.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  It starts out by indicating that God gives order to chaos, that within the context of six days, God maps it all out, separates light from dark, separates land from water, gives existence to various creatures. And out of dust, God creates the first man, Adam, and breathed into him the breath of life.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So we read in the creation story that God created humankind, Adam and Eve, and then placed them in the Garden of Eden, and that this place should be understood as being a beautiful, life-giving oasis.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  God plants trees, beautiful trees, good for eating, all around the garden. And in the middle of the garden, he plants the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  God tells them, "Go about your business, enjoy this paradise, but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you don't mess with that. You eat from that, and you will die." Everyone knows what happens next. Eve encounters this serpent, according to the narrative. And the serpent tells Eve, "I know what God has said, but if you eat this fruit, you won't die. You'll just get really smart. You'll have the kind of knowledge that God has, and that's what God fears."

• 4:29Speaker 04

  She eats, she gives some to the man who was with her, he eats. And sure enough, the serpent was right. They don't drop dead. Their eyes are opened. They see that they're naked, and they're ashamed, and they're fearful, and they hide from God behind a tree.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  According to the account in Genesis, Adam and Eve cover their nakedness by fashioning fig leaves into loin cloths.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  And God says, "Who told you you were naked? Did you eat from the tree I told you not to eat from?" They admit it, and God kicks the man and the woman out of the garden.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And this changes everything. God says, "This paradise, you can no longer have."

• 5:16Speaker 04

  When God chucks the man and the woman out of Eden, he stations cherubim to guard the way back in. The cherubim are frightening hybrid creatures, and God stations them east of Eden.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  But where on earth did this biblical story of man's expulsion from paradise take place? Where can we locate the Garden of Eden?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  For those who are determined to find the physical location of the Garden of Eden, they will turn to Genesis.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  In the early chapters of Genesis, there are a couple of geographical markers that relate where Eden was or may have been, as per the writer of this section of the narrative.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  The story specifies that God plants a garden in the east. Now, the writers are in Israel. "In the east" means somewhere east of Israel.

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  It's written in Genesis that a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it divided and became four headwaters.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  We are given four rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pishon, and the Gihon. And we know, in our day and age, where the Tigris and the Euphrates are, but we don't know exactly where the Gihon and the Pishon are. We can do our best to make educated guesses, but we do not know the location of those rivers. We do not know if topography is the same. And so this brings up another question as to whether those rivers still exist, when they stopped existing. We simply do not have enough information concerning where these two rivers may have been.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  According to the biblical text, the Garden of Eden is east. And so you have to think about the vantage point of those who are writing. And for some of those who are writing, pushing towards the east and thinking in terms of two of the rivers that are outlined, the Euphrates and the Tigris, they would argue that where those are situated is where you find the Garden of Eden. This is where the Bible is trying to direct us.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Leading us to theory number one: it's somewhere in Iraq. In ancient times, Iraq was part of a land 500 miles east of Israel known as Mesopotamia.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Mesopotamia is the ancient Greek word for the land between the two rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It's the land in central Iraq, not altogether too far from the great cities of today, such as Baghdad. And the ancient city of Babylon is actually relatively near to Baghdad. What archaeologists have established were the first cities in human history, such as Ur, were built within this fertile space between the two rivers.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Ancient Mesopotamia was part of what's called the Fertile Crescent. There were sections of this area that were fertile because there was water running through the Fertile Crescent.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  It was a fruitful location. It produced a great deal, just like the Garden of Eden.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  And there's one town within this once vibrant region that claims to be the location of the Garden of Eden.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  This is the town of Alcorna. Alcorna is about 60 miles north of the city of Basra in southern Iraq. It's between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. It's a place, then, that certainly Christian archaeologists and scholars in the 19th century very much began to associate with the place where the real Eden might have been located.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  In Al-Gurna, we have a sign that says, "The Tree of Adam," purporting to be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Even today, in Alcorna, local Iraqi Christians and Muslims

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Still go on pilgrimage to the Tree of Adam. But it's doubtful a tree could live that long. Science tells us that the oldest living tree, an ancient bristlecone pine in California, is a little over 5,000 years old. For Alcorna's Tree of Adam to have been growing in the Garden of Eden, it would have to be far older than that. In the mid-1980s, an American scientist proposes a theory which backs the hypothesis that the Garden of Eden was in present-day Iraq.

• 9:52Speaker 07

  Dr. Yuris Zarens, he is involved in a dig in the 1980s where his team starts to do a lot of satellite photography of the Persian Gulf. From these satellite photos, Zarens sees an area of these wadis, these riverbeds, that are now completely dry. But thousands of years ago, they were not. So if you look now at any map, Google Satellite, Google Earth, you're not going to find the same geographical locations or the same geographical features as you found thousands and thousands of years ago. There's been climate change. Things have kind of moved around. Places that were dry were completely flooded out.

• 10:32Speaker 06

  One of the really surprising things, though, about the Middle East is how dramatically the geography has changed in the last 10,000 years. So many parts of the world that are submerged now were really just above ground. One of those places that was above ground was the Persian Gulf.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Dr. Yuris Zarens, an archaeologist from Missouri State University, says there's a reason that we can't find the Garden of Eden. And it's because it's in that part of Iraq that lies underneath the water of the Persian Gulf.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  And today, much of this area of Iraq is nothing like the lush paradise described in Genesis.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  We need to understand that this was a long, long time ago. And with the Ice Age, there were really profound shifts.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  From Zarens' perspective, as the glaciers melted and began to contribute their water to the Persian Gulf, the waters would have risen and covered the space where the Garden of Eden was.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  He notes that the people who lived in that area were hunter-gatherers who had to move as the waters rose.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  So Zarens presumes that the people who were living in the place now covered by seawater would have moved northwest into the Tigris and Euphrates River basin that we're familiar with today.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  This isn't in the Bible, but some of the legends are is that the Garden of Eden ends up being kind of washed away in the flood. There was a world before the flood, and there was a world after.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  So is the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden a symbolic departure from a flooded homeland? Or could the Garden of Eden be someplace else?

• 12:04Speaker 02

  What the garden points to is our most intense relationship with the divine. Some folks will say, you have to look in Jerusalem, that this is where God is most forcefully felt.

• 12:20Speaker 06

  There's four rivers coming out of Eden toward in the garden. So you can see the garden in the center of Eden and four rivers coming from Eden into it.

• 12:28Speaker 07

  The Book of Genesis makes it clear that one of the four rivers there in the Garden of Eden is the Gihon. And we don't really know where the Gihon is. However, there is actually a spring that's called the Gihon, a word that means, in fact, gushing up of water. And that spring is located in Jerusalem.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So some may have identified this word with the same Gihon that's in the narrative at the beginning of the Book of Genesis. And so that may lead people to identify the location of the Garden of Eden with Jerusalem in Israel.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  You have to understand the symbolic significance of the garden. What the garden points to is our most intense relationship with the divine. And so some folks will say, ah, that's Jerusalem. That's the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  So that's theory number two. It's on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. For nearly 3,000 years, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been one of the holiest sites of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. It's where the first and second Hebrew temples were built.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  As the Book of Kings tells it, the Jerusalem temple was built by King Solomon in about 1,000 BCE, that is, before the time of Jesus.

• 13:54Speaker 07

  We know a little bit about this temple. It's rectangular, and it's got progressively smaller rooms. And each one of these rooms, as you move into it, becomes more holy. And the holiest place in the Jerusalem temple is the Holy of Holies. And that is where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. And it was also thought to be really the throne of God and that God lived in the Jerusalem temple. And there are two places in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, where God is said to be physically present. One is the Garden of Eden, and the other is the Jerusalem temple.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Part of this whole creation narrative is the idea of God communing with human beings. Eventually, we see God having a special presence, God's glory in the temple. He had a special presence there. This is set up to be the place where God will commune with humankind, not dissimilar to the Garden of Eden.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Is it possible the ancient biblical author had the temple in mind when describing Eden?

• 14:59Speaker 06

  What's interesting about how the tabernacle and the temple are constructed and the story of the Torah is that there's an immense amount of garden imagery.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  If we were to go into that temple that Solomon built, this is a cedar wood-lined building. Look at the walls. I'm seeing palm trees. I'm seeing flowers. I'm seeing pomegranates. I'm indoors, but I feel like I'm outdoors. And if I was permitted to go past the guardian curtain that would lead to the Holy of Holies, what I'd see on the Ark of the Covenant? To cherubim.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  In the Holy of Holies, two giant statues of cherubim guarded the ark. In the first creation story in Genesis, God stations the cherubim at the exit to Eden so that no one can turn and enter again.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  So for some folks who are interested in finding a physical location for the Garden of Eden, the Temple Mount is the proper location. But you can also look at the Temple Mount in the Garden of Eden and think about it in terms of just being a metaphor.

• 16:13Speaker 07

  Could the Garden of Eden story have been actually just a sort of a metaphor for Jerusalem and the most important building in Jerusalem, which was the Jewish temple?

• 16:31Speaker 00

  It's recorded history that the temple was destroyed in 587 BCE. After the destruction of their temple, the conquered Hebrew people are carried off into exile in Babylon.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  According to the narrative, when Adam and Eve are forced out of the garden, they head east. When the temple is destroyed, the people of God also move east to Babylon.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Could it be that the Garden of Eden story is a metaphor for the exile of the Jews from Israel and the loss of the great temple where God and man coexisted?

• 17:05Speaker 04

  An event as cataclysmic and traumatic as the Babylonian exile, the destruction of Jerusalem, is bound to be remembered and imagined and processed in all kinds of different ways. One possibility is that the story of the Garden of Eden symbolizes the Jerusalem temple.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  What we see in the exile of the people from the temple building all the way through their exile, we see the pattern that we end up seeing also in the first couple of chapters of the Book of Genesis. That is, God communing with human beings, disobedience, exile.

• 17:43Speaker 06

  And there's also some really strong themes about how, why we might have lost the Garden of Eden, that there's going to be a new Eden. And so that's why some people have really hit on the idea of maybe it's being Jerusalem where the Garden of Eden was.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  So to think about Jerusalem as the location for the Garden of Eden on the level of metaphor works for a whole lot of folks.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  The search for the Garden of Eden often focuses on Middle Eastern lands where the biblical stories take place. But some Eden explorers have taken another approach.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  While some point to this kind of physical geography as the way to locate the Garden of Eden, some turn and argue it's best to try to locate the Garden of Eden based upon the early presence of humans.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  Even in science publications, there's discussion of the Garden of Eden. Of Eden as a metaphor of the origin of of humans.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  If the Garden of Eden story is an explanation of human creation, then logically, might the real paradise be found in the cradle of humankind?

• 18:47Speaker 07

  Given that our oldest human fossils actually all come from Africa, maybe we should think of the Garden of Eden as having been in Africa.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  It's not Iraq, it's Africa. The science would suggest this is the birthplace. It only makes sense to some folks who are looking for the garden to turn to this place where humans lived for thousands upon thousands of years, that this is what the Book of Genesis is describing. This is what the garden is all about.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  And that's theory number three. It's somewhere in Africa.

• 19:27Speaker 07

  Some scientists believe that the answer to human origins is not really just to be found in the fossil record, but actually in human genetics.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  In 2019, a scientific breakthrough ushers in a new theory about the birth of Homo sapiens.

• 19:43Speaker 07

  We have very early bone and skull fragments from South Africa, and those date back to about 260,000 years ago. So in 2019, an Australian geneticist, Dr. Vanessa Hayes, actually goes to South Africa and wants to trace back the DNA of humans to try to see if they can get back to the earliest record of human beings, looking at them genetically.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  There are two types of DNA. Nuclear DNA, which comes from both the mother and father, and mitochondrial DNA, which only comes down through the maternal line.

• 20:22Speaker 07

  And it stays stable. So tens of thousands of years, you can still trace back mitochondrial DNA. So it becomes a really powerful tool for tracing back human genetics.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Using mitochondrial DNA, Dr. Hayes sought to trace back the genetic timeline to the exact spot where modern humans first emerged.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  One element in that genetic sequence, L0, can be traced back through mothers, all the way back to one mother, the so-called mitochondrial Eve.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  You know, the best science now tells us that Adam and Eve, if they existed in the past, even in the relatively recent past, would most likely be ancestors of everyone, including everyone in the Americas.

• 21:07Speaker 07

  So Dr. Hayes engages in this large study, where she looks at the mitochondrial DNA of a sample base of about 1,200 indigenous Africans.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  What the study has done is followed the L0 sequence back through 200 South Africans, and compared it to more than 1,000 Africans from the north, and determined that mitochondrial Eve likely is to be located in Kalahari Desert of Botswana. For a whole lot of folks thinking in terms of the Garden of Eden, within the context of Botswana, you've got two things that are undeniably significant for them. Longstanding presence of humans and a lush environment.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  The Kalahari Desert in Botswana is a very, very arid, dry place. But it wasn't always so. 300 to 200,000 years ago, it was wetlands. It was very, very green. The wetlands there were actually part of a giant lake system that was as large as England, called Lake Makati Kati.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Based on the fossil record, this wetland was home to an abundance of fish, birds, and other animals, large and small.

• 22:22Speaker 07

  Around 130,000 years ago, Lake Makati Kati dried up, and the people who were living in that area would have been forced, really kind of expelled from that area, to go and find where they could survive. So once again, we have an interesting kind of mirroring with the story of the Garden of Eden, where they're cast out of the garden that gave them everything, where they need to go and they need to find a new way to exist.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Some researchers believe the existence of 315,000-year-old Homo sapien fossils found in other parts of Africa contradict the Botswana theory. Ultimately, the birthplace of humankind remains a matter of scientific debate and further discovery.

• 23:05Speaker 07

  It's a tremendously complex question, where human beings originated from, and we just don't know the answer yet.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  In the search for the Garden of Eden, scientists and scholars have looked to some of the oldest sites in human civilization. But it's a shepherd in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 1994 who stumbles upon a temple more than twice as old as any ancient ruins ever found. Did he accidentally rediscover the Garden of Eden? So here's theory number four. It's somewhere in Turkey.

• 23:40Speaker 07

  There's a shepherd who is tending his flocks in the sort of mountainous area in southeastern Turkey. And his foot sort of hits something hard on the ground. It's a rock, and he bends down and brushes away the debris to see what he's got there. And he finds a large stone, it's kind of carved. And it turns out, that's not the only stone. There are many others like it.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  We have now discovered a temple, which very well may be the oldest temple ever discovered. We call it Gobekli Tepe, which is just a word for pot-bellied hill.

• 24:18Speaker 07

  By 1995, a year later, this site has caught the interest of international archaeologists. And there's a dig there that is initiated by a German archaeologist by the name of Klaus Schmidt.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  When Dr. Schmidt's team arrives on Gobekli Tepe in 1995, they begin to unearth giant T-shaped megaliths, some still standing, surrounded by many millennia of earth and rocks.

• 24:45Speaker 07

  It's a huge site. We have 22 acres of excavated territory, and we think that maybe only 5% of it has actually been uncovered.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Gobekli Tepe is really a series of temple structures. At the center of each one of these structures are two massive T-shaped monoliths.

• 25:12Speaker 07

  They're massive. They're 16 feet high. They weigh tons. And the most mind-blowing thing is how old it is.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  The carbon dating results appear to fundamentally change the timeline of human civilization.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  The discovery of Gobekli Tepe has really revolutionized how we start to think about early human history. It very likely dates to between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago. That would make it about 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, probably about 7,000 years or more older than the pyramids of Giza. That's thousands of years before the birth of agriculture. What that means is that this extraordinary structure was built by hunter-gatherers, who were very likely wearing animal skins and who hadn't invented the wheel yet.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Gobekli Tepe's most remarkable features are its ornate carvings, carvings which could link this ancient site to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

• 26:19Speaker 07

  The megaliths are carved very beautifully, with all kinds of images, mostly of animals. In fact, snakes are among the most commonly depicted animals at Gobekli Tepe.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  There seems to be some consensus that what we have at Gobekli Tepe could reflect a very complex mythology.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  These serpent carvings aren't the only possible connection to the Book of Genesis.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  There is one other geographical notation in the Garden of Eden mythology, which is that it is in the east. Very likely, what that means is east of the Holy Land, but west of Assyria. That location, which is also along the lines of the Tigris and the Euphrates, would place the Garden of Eden probably closer to southeastern Turkey than in modern Iraq. It's clear that the region around Gobekli Tepe has been a place of sacred geography for Muslims, Christians, Jewish people,

• 27:29Speaker 02

  and indeed, the earliest of the Neolithic peoples who made that transition from hunter-gathering to living in cities in that region of northern.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  And Mesopotamia and what is now southeastern Turkey.

• 27:45Speaker 07

  Now, this is pre agrarian, but according to Schmidt, the site marks this kind of transition of hunter gatherers as a culture into an agrarian society.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  So when we think about the Garden of Eden mythology, it represents a world before the rise of agriculture.

• 28:09Speaker 07

  Maybe this Garden of Eden story about these primordial hunter gatherers, Adam and Eve, being cast out and having to till the soil and work the soil for a living. That story is very profound about this change in human civilization that we know actually was factual.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  While archaeologists believed the builders of this massive complex were hunter gatherers, the civilization that occupied the same land thousands of years later was far more advanced.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  The Sumerians invented irrigation systems that made that part of the world fertile and lush for them.

• 28:50Speaker 07

  The Sumerians were the first agricultists. They were the first people to grow food.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  The Sumerians also developed the oldest known written language in the world.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  They were able to actually write down their great mythologies. These stories were able to be spread beyond the boundaries of the Sumerian empire.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Sometime between 2100 and 1200 BCE, a Sumerian writer produced the Epic of Gilgamesh. Scholars believed the Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1,000 years.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  The Epic of Gilgamesh is a Mesopotamian story about a man who goes on a quest to find the secret of eternal life. He makes it as far as a special mountain, the mountain of the sunrise. The sunrise, meaning in the east. Gilgamesh makes it through the mountain and finds himself in a jeweled garden.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  We see so many similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of the Garden of Eden. There's the key role of the serpent in ensuring that humankind is going to stay mortal forever. There's the jeweled garden. This sacred realm, this unique location where immortality is kept and guarded is not a place any human being can ever really find.

• 30:25Speaker 07

  The Garden of Eden that's written down in the Book of Genesis could refer back to earlier written precedents like the Epic of Gilgamesh. And if you want to tie Gobekli Tepe back to the Garden of Eden story, some say the location of the Garden of Eden might actually have been in southeastern Turkey.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Coming up, is it possible that the Garden of Eden was located in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth?

• 31:02Speaker 00

  In the late 19th century, a new theory emerges placing the Garden of Eden in one of the most unlikely locations imaginable.

• 31:11Speaker 06

  In 1885, William F. Warren, who's the president of Boston University, a theologian, actually argues that maybe the Garden of Eden used to be at the top of the world.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Introducing theory number five, it's at the North Pole. William Warren's book, Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, opens with a redrawn world map on which all the continents are arrayed around the Arctic Circle.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  If you take a globe and flatten it out, his argument was, you get the North Pole at the top and everything else seems to move around it. And for him, it lent support to his argument that the North Pole is the top of the world. It is the birthplace of humanity.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  For Warren, the similarity in the perspective on a Garden of Eden-like place, the idea that you have a similar story being told in all of these different places suggests a common starting point that eventually spread over the entire world.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Warren lives in an era when new scientific evidence begins to reveal that before the Ice Age, the Earth was not as cold.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  We look at a world that is much, much older than maybe we had thought it was before. We're suddenly going to see changes in glaciation. We're going to see changes in geologic record that suggest this world was a warmer place than it had been before. Which, by the way, isn't necessarily out of harmony with the Book of Genesis, which I think suggests a different world than we had before.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Warren believes a warmer Earth means the North Pole would have once been a livable place. And a study published in the journal Nature in 2006 may support his claim. The study, based on core samples taken from more than 1,000 feet below the floor of the Arctic Ocean, concluded that over 50 million years ago, the Arctic had an average temperature of 74 degrees.

• 33:09Speaker 06

  There is actually really good evidence that these places often were very lush in the very, very distant past. So that encouraged some speculation about the idea about Adam and Eve maybe being in the Garden of Eden back then.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Warren was looking for a place for the Garden of Eden. He presumed that you needed one where you had lots and lots of sunlight, a better place than the North Pole.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Because the Earth rotates on a tilted axis as it revolves around the Sun, the North Pole has six straight months of daylight, followed by six months of darkness. Warren sees the dark half of the polar year as a time for spiritual reflection.

• 33:46Speaker 07

  There was this romantic idea that you would be there and you would be directly under the heavens, in communication with the heavens, and you would watch the stars and everything swirling around you. So this was a kind of connection between the heaven and earth, that sense of being at the place where God was when he separated the firmaments and he put the heavens above and the earth below.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  In Islamic tradition, the Garden of Eden is the garden from which humans were expelled before history. And when Adam and Eve were expelled, they were separated in different parts of the world.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  For Dr. Warren, as the North Pole changed, as it became colder and colder, changes in the natural environment forced folks to flee, to migrate to areas that better supported life.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Warren connects that ancient Ice Age migration from the North Pole to stories of man's expulsion from Eden.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  For Warren, as he looks at these traditions around the world, he sees them as evidence of a memory of being kicked out of paradise and moving down towards the equator. And for him, the Adam and Eve story that we have in Genesis was that story in Israel.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  It's important to recognize in 19th century, folks knew very little about the North Pole. And so for a lot of folks, this was a real possibility based upon what they assumed concerning the North Pole. And so for some folks, his argument was persuasive.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Till his dying day, age of 96, Warren maintained the Garden of Eden was at the North Pole.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  However, skeptics point out that the period when the North Pole had a tropical climate predates the rise of man.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  What he points to in terms of that area being able to support robust life, we're talking about roughly 50 million years ago.

• 35:42Speaker 06

  There wasn't really anything like a human or even a monkey or an ape at that time.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  And there's another factor that makes Warren's theory less likely.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  The North Pole itself is really just ice through and through. If you melt it away, there's no ground there.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Ever since satellite images began to be taken of the Arctic 40 years ago, it's been determined that up to half of that ice has gone away. And the prediction is that by 2040, it'll be gone. And if that happens, we're going to watch Warren's theory, quite literally, melt away.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Here's another possibility. Could it be possible that the Garden of Eden is sitting in the middle of the American heartland? In the spring of 1820, in Western New York State, a 14-year-old Joseph Smith claims that God came to him in a vision.

• 36:34Speaker 07

  In 1820, Joseph Smith was given a revelation by God. Now, Joseph Smith lived in the heart of what's called the Second Great Awakening. It was a time of religious revival. And so young Joseph really felt that he was called as a prophet.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  Joseph Smith says that, you know, God, the Son and the Father came to him in a vision.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  So the angel Moroni came to him as well and told him that all these other churches were wrong. In 1823, Smith claims to have another revelation in which an angel leads him to find a series of gold plates buried for more than 1,400 years in the hills of Palmyra, New York.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Joseph Smith said that if these golden plates were written in an otherwise unknown language, he called reformed Egyptian.

• 37:23Speaker 07

  And he spends some years translating these golden plates, and that's how we get the Book of Mormon.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Which is like this testament of when Jesus actually came to the Americas after He rose from the dead and kind of proclaimed the gospel there.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  The Book of Mormon not only lays the foundation for the beliefs of the Mormon faith, but it also describes Middle Eastern tribes that leave the Middle East and arrive in America about 589 B.C.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  According to Mormon belief, an Israelite named Lehi journeyed with his family from the Middle East to the Americas around 600 B.C.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Some church leaders teach that during the Great Biblical Flood, humanity on the Ark was carried back across the ocean to the Middle East.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  As Smith builds his following, he claims to have another visit from God on July 20, 1831.

• 38:20Speaker 07

  According to Mormon history, in this revelation, God shows him the real location of the Garden of Eden.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  God reveals to him that the Garden of Eden wasn't actually in Mesopotamia.

• 38:36Speaker 07

  Although Smith didn't name the location in his translation, he told many early followers of his where the site actually was.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  According to Theory Number Six, it's in Jackson County, Missouri.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  It's not uncommon for religious communities to think theologically about their location as being powerful, important, connected to the biblical text. And that is the case for the Mormons, who argue that God told Joseph Smith that the Garden of Eden wasn't over there somewhere. It's not Turkey, it's not any of those locations. The Garden of Eden is actually in Missouri.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  In 1831, Smith establishes a Mormon outpost in Jackson County, Missouri, near the town of Independence. Smith says God revealed this location as the site of the Garden of Eden.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Mormonism, as the quintessentially American religion, quite naturally places the Garden of Eden in America. After all, that is the birthplace of the religion. It's the birthplace of the prophets of the religion. So if a Mormon is looking for the Garden of Eden, chances are that they're looking in Missouri.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  According to Mormon tradition, Adam built two altars in this Missouri Garden of Eden, an altar of sacrifice and an altar of prayer.

• 40:05Speaker 07

  And in fact, if you go to that area today, you'll find that those stone altars are still there, the ones that Adam himself was said to have built.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  For a time, Smith and his followers settled in Missouri to be near their lost garden paradise, but tensions with their non-Mormon neighbors grow violent, and they're forced to move. After they were asked to leave Missouri by the governor, they end up going a little bit north and settling just to the north of Missouri. Smith and his flock settled in Nabu, Illinois, but in 1844, Smith and his brother were arrested and jailed in Carthage, Illinois. An angry mob attacked the jail and shot Smith and his brother to death. Two years later, Smith's successor, Brigham Young, leads the Mormons west, finally settling in Salt Lake City, Utah.

• 40:57Speaker 07

  But a group of Joseph Smith's original followers actually don't go with everybody out to Utah, and they stay put. And they're still there in the area around Independence, and they're known as the Community of Christ. They're still there in the promised land.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Official Mormon teaching hasn't abandoned the idea that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Joseph Smith believed that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, which he had near Independence, Missouri, they moved 70 miles to the north to a valley called Adam und die Aman, which is translated "The Valley of God where Adam dwelt." So Joseph Smith has suggested that Adam will return to this place, Adam und die Aman, in order to prepare for the second coming of Jesus.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Starting in 1947, members of the Mormon Church began purchasing land in Missouri near the Valley of God where Adam dwelt. As of 2021, the church owns approximately 3,000 acres there.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  We really have no reference in the biblical text to places in North America, no reference to any place that could have been maybe even misunderstood as North America. Why is it important to locate the actual Garden of Eden? Human beings have been asking since day one where we came from. It's important to us as contemporary readers because we are inquisitive. We want to know. We want this to also be part of our story. And so that's why I think we're asking this question.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  While researchers and scientists continue their quest to find the cradle of human life, for many people of faith, there's no point in searching because it's written in Genesis that after Adam and Eve were banished, God blocked man from ever returning to Eden by posting an angel to guard the entrance, an angel with a flaming sword. So even if someone does locate the garden, they may have a challenging time trying to get in. Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.