Scientists are now suggesting that there may be truth to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
According to the Bible, Adam and Eve were created from dust and lived in the Garden of Eden.
While this story was previously considered to be mythical, researchers have found evidence that suggests humans may have descended from a single pair of ancestors, just like the pair from the Book of Genesis, the Daily Star reports.
Studies of modern humans have revealed that the ancestors who passed on the male Y chromosomes and female mitochondrial DNA may have lived around the same time, contradicting the previous theory that they lived tens of thousands of years apart.
Researchers at the University of Sassari, Italy, estimate that Adam lived 180,000-200,000 years ago, which is similar to the estimated age of Eve. Archaeologists believe that the Garden of Eden may have been located in Mesopotamia, which is now modern-day eastern Syria, northwestern Turkey, and most of Iraq.
This theory is supported by Professor Eric Cline, a classical and biblical archaeologist from George Washington University, who argues that it matches the evidence. He wrote in his book ‘From Eden to Exile’: “This makes some sense from a textual point of view.
“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.”
However, a rival theory published in the journal Nature suggests that Africa’s Kalahari Desert is “the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today”.
Geneticists have been studying one of the oldest DNA lineages on Earth, known as L0, which is passed down through females.
Vanessa Hayes from the University of Sydney, who authored the study, previously stated: “We’ve known for a long time that humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago. But what we hadn’t known until this study was where, exactly this homeland was.”
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