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In the beginning ... Sometimes in life you come across explanations or discoveries, which are so amazing, that even though they can never fully prove whether a new explanation is true or not, it just blows any prior assumption out of the water. Case in point: of all the conspiracy theories around the assassination of President Kennedy, the documentary “The Smoking Gun” 2013, made by far the most sense. Although Oswald fired the first 3 non-lethal shots, the 4th and final shot was fired off, accidentally (no one claims it was a murder), with this M16 automatic weapon carried by a secret service agent, who was an untrained driver and not even a regular agent. The M16 was the only other rifle that was clearly there on the scene, on pictures, and the only gun with military fragmentation bullets that could literally blow your brains out. The shot was fired from the correct, much lower, angle. Oswald didn’t have a gun for these bullets, he was located too high. Case closed, if it weren’t for the decades old successful cover-up by the secret service. It’s not for nothing that they confiscated, and made disappear, photo and film rolls. Fortunately, this picture survived. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=269NiovMgrs https://tubitv.com/movies/319705/jfk-the-smoking-gun Another example of an amazing discovery is answering why the Titanic was sailing so fast and in such a straight direction towards New York, while the captain knew there were ice bergs reported? It was often reported that the ship’s owner Ismay, wanted a speed record for the crossing. But in reality, the Titanic would never have been fast enough, and the ship was on fire from the moment she went sailing. One of the coal bunkers was burning. It was reluctantly, quickly, mentioned in the official inquiry. There is absolute no doubt she was on fire. This storage bunker was right in the location where the ice berg later impacted. The fire, after days of burning, likely made the hull (and the compartmentalization walls) much weaker than elsewhere on the ship. One the one hand, the captain could only get rid of the burning coal by stoking it as fast a possible, with the ship going as fast as possible. On the other hand, by stoking as much as they needed to, the captain risked not having enough coal to reach NY. So, he had to sail as fast and in a straight as possible direction, ignoring the risks of ice bergs. This explanation is very much questioned by experts, but it truly blows any other explanation straight out of the water, so to speak. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5imcl8 The following story is one such amazing new explanation. It’s in that special league. While reading this, we must not forget that other experts were basing their careers, and income, from alternative explanations, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of blow-back, until a new explanation get generally accepted. There have been lots of people who make tons of money out off Kennedy, Titanic, Ripper and biblical fabrications in particular. What is important is that this publication below was very well researched, and not one of your regular baseless internet conspiracies. This story is about the “Garden of Eden”, the supposedly biblical birthplace of all humanity. The story was one way of showing how the human world came to be as we know it. But is it just a story? Or did something like an Eden really exist? Every culture has a story that says “this is how we came to be”. This is what really happened. This is how it all began. Of course, they are all for 99% fictitious. But some could have a touch of real history in them to make them sound more realistic. One Maverick scientist was desperate to know the truth. Why did they tell that story of the garden of Eden? Where did it come from? And what was behind it? He risked his career to find the answer. No one would take him serious anymore if he just came up with a new supposedly location of Eden. And there was indeed a backlash, there are scientists today who can't believe it. But this search was indeed exceptional, this is the story of one man's quest for the garden of Eden, and it looks like, he succeeded. In 1987, Smithsonian Magazine, Volume 18. No. 2, May 1987, published an article about the work of a little known archaeologist named Juris Zarins. In it, Zarins claimed to know the earthly location of paradise: the garden of Eden. Zarins' work caused a storm, many religious people felt it was sacrilege to apply scientific principles to the word of God. “Genesis should be accepted on faith, or not at all”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins & http://www.ldolphin.org/eden/ Some respected academics were deeply skeptical. They thought Zarins was just wasting their time. Many biblical scholars thought the Eden story was just an allegory, with no basis in fact. Already by the 19th century, many educated people no longer thought the story of the garden of Eden as a literal account of the beginning of humanity, explaining the fall of mankind. Most scientists in his field could not understand why he was so stupid to research the garden of Eden location based upon the Genesis story? It just didn’t make sense in the early 80s. Unlike others before him, for Zarins this was not a religious quest, nor was it a hunt for treasure or precious relics. You have to remember that by far most biblical scholars are what? They are christians, they deeply believe in this cult. So they start with an answer, “a truth”, a dogma, that can hardly be questioned, and then they try to find evidence to support that truth, possibly throwing out a lot of contradictions. You also have to remember that these biblical scholars tend to work for biblical seminars and colleges who will not accept research that is contradictory to their believes. These scholars could easily lose their income if for example they publish evidence that Jesus is all myth and not reality. There are quite a number of examples where biblical scholars ruined their career. You have to be a very well established biblical scholar to go against that flow. When you hear “most biblical scholars believe” ... be very skeptical! They are well kept in line. However, Zirens is an atheist. His journey was motivated purely by the thirst for knowledge, no matter where that would lead him. Zirens wanted to know about the origins of modern human society. Even as an atheist, he thought that the answers would lay in, of all places, a biblical legend. He had a great passion for the vast deserts of Arabia. Arabia was a rich terrain for an up and coming archaeologist. Unlike the well-researched sites of the ancient classical worlds, the Mediterranean and Egypt, Arabia was undiscovered country. Arabia was once as great a cultural landscape as it’s a desert now. Literally, archaeologists for long hadn't been allowed to research in Arabia. The tribes were too dangerous in most places. And then there is the fast remoteness, many places are so remote, he was the first person to ever touch items that were half a million years old. Zarins developed a reputation as a Maverick. He was frequently in the news with discoveries. He started on a project in Oman related to another biblical story: the legend of the three Kings bearing gifts of gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. His goal was not to find biblical evidence, he wanted to find out about the Frankincense trade. They wanted to know how long people had been trading Frankincense, and how it came to be such a valuable commodity across the ancient world? Frankincense only grows in a couple of places in the world. It originated in the Oman/Yemen region. They went to study the trade routes on the ground. Where it would have come from? How they would have transported it? What they were doing with it? Zarins and his colleagues worked in Oman's desert for more than four years, looking for evidence of trade routes stretching as far as India, Egypt, and Rome. He was a serious researcher in the field. He had a track record. They made an extraordinary discovery, a lost city called “Ubar”. Legends of Ubar can be found in the book of 1001 Arabian nights, where it is described as a place of fantastic wealth and lush greenery in the desert. According to the Koran, it was supposedly destroyed by God as a punishment for its misbehaving king. Indeed until Zarins and his colleague, Nicholas Clapp, found it, no one was even sure if Ubar really existed. The location was real, but currently the name “Ubar” is still in question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_of_the_Sands They found this location as an oasis in the center of southern Oman. This was the jumping off place where they were congregating and sending out caravans. There are still traces of thousands of animals, used for transportation, and their directions. They were using Frankincense, among other things, to trade. Those trade caravans moved through there for many centuries. Zarins discovered that Frankincense had been traded across the region not for just centuries, but for 8,000 years before the place was abandoned. From Ubar, frankincense caravans would have set off in all directions, including of course, to the “holy” land, or better named “the Levant”. Along with goods to sell, these caravans would also have carried other important cultural cargo: “stories”. Including many that eventually found their way into the Hebrew bible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankincense Zarins realized the Old Testament authors borrowed tons of material from other cultures. It's called plagiarism. They plagiarized ancient stories, basically stole it, and repackaged it. The Hebrew Bible repackaged stories that were much older, and came from locations where people actually lived and experienced these stories. Zarins began to wonder about the origins of one fable in particular. The tale of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. He wondered whether it was one of these stories that had been “borrowed” from another cultures. Of all the many fables in the bible, this one seemed to him to be based on real events. But how could he find scientific evidence? Zarrins was convinced that the ancient Hebrew or Canaanite people could not have possibly created this legend on their own. But where then did it come from? The first clue came from the very word “Eden” itself. How this word ended up in the bible had always been something of a mystery, because it is not native to the Hebrew language. Eden doesn't mean anything in Hebrew. They therefore must have imported the story from somewhere else. Zarins figured it came from an area about 800 miles to the east of Judea: Mesopotamia. This was the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It was the area of the world's oldest known civilization. It housed the first people who created an organized urban society: the Sumerians. The Sumerians were the earliest groups of people who settled, and begin to cultivate their land. It’s on the territory of the “Sumers” were the first organized group of agricultural city states began to develop through a trading network of their crops, using their rivers. It was these ancient people who first used the word Eden. It's a very ancient word, meaning in Sumerian “land of steps” or “grasslands where people lived wild”, “where animals were wild”. The Sumerians use the term Eden to refer to uncultivated areas beyond their territory. In other words, the sort of place where nature was not controlled by man, “but by God” in Hebrew terminology. If this word Eden came from Mesopotamia, than it seemed logical that the garden of Eden was once located there as well. This idea was supported by the fact that many early bible stories have Mesopotamian roots. If you look at the history of the biblical people, if you look at a biblical Abraham, he “came” from somewhere in that region. Most christians don't know that the area of Sumers is mentioned in Genesis as “Shinar” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinar The tower of Babel, the first 12 chapters of the book of Genesis up to the point where Abraham departs for Egypt, takes place in Mesopotamia, and are all Sumerian stories. So, in the 1980s, Zarins' starting point was the bible itself and its first oldest part, the book of Genesis. The Bible has two accounts of creation. The garden of Eden story is the second one and probably the earlier one. The story begins when God plants a garden in “Eden”. There, he made every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food. And of course, in the middle of the garden, he put the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, that of good and of evil. The story is one way of showing how the human world came to be as the Israelites knew it. There was a kind of test in the garden. There were these two trees, the tree of life, which the first humans are not barred from eating, which gives them mortality. And the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, which gives some kind of wisdom. As every Sunday school student knows, one day, a serpent tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. So she eats of the tree of knowledge and gives some to her husband, Adam, who was a clear idiot. As punishment, God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden. And later destroyed Eden, along with the rest of the earth, by the great biblical flood. Ever since that “day”, people have sought to find Eden, or at least evidence that it truly existed. The text of the Bible actually provides some tantalizing clues about Eden's possible location. Genesis chapter three verses 10 to 14, where a river is said to came out of the garden of Eden, and became four headwaters. Only for two of the rivers in question, the Tigris and Euphrates, we know where they are. They are currently the two major rivers of Mesopotamia, of Iraq. The other two rivers are called the Pishon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pishon and the Gihon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gihon. Unlike the Tigris and the Euphrates, no one in biblical times in Judea knew where these other two rivers once ran. Or if they ever really existed? The Pison was said to encompass a mineral rich land called “Havilah”. And the Gihon was said to flow through a land called “Cush”. Some versions of the Bible translate Cush as Ethiopia. Locating these two rivers, and where they joined with the Tigris and Euphrates, to form the famous four headwaters, was the key to unlocking the mystery of Eden's position. If everybody knew where the four rivers were, the biblical scholars we solve this question years ago. The location of the Pison and Gihon has baffled scholars for centuries. Many medieval thinkers thought the Pison might be the river Ganges, India's holiest river. As for the Gihon, even today, most biblical scholars believe that it refers to the river Nile. The text says the river Gihon flows around the whole land of Cush, and Cush in the old Testament means Nubia current day Sudan. Jewish tradition was very strongly convinced of that “fact” over many centuries. But that interpretation presented a serious problem. The Nile isn't anywhere near the Tigris or the Euphrates. So there was no place on earth where the four could join up. The ancient knowledge of distant geography wasn't perfect, to say the least. Their geography has a bit confused. If the authors of the bible made such fundamental errors as to connect rivers that were far apart, how could they be trusted about anything else? The garden of Eden could be literally anywhere. For hundreds of years, scholars have faced this exact problem. And some of them found a very inventive solution. They put the garden of Eden wherever they wanted. Well, a president of Boston university no less, called William Warren, “located” the garden of Eden at the North Pole. Mormons still locate the garden of Eden in Jackson county, Missouri, in the United States. Columbus thought he had found it by the Orinoco river, in Venezuela. There was some who wants it located in China. But for Zarins, the bible’s incoherent geography left him at a dead end. If he tried to follow its directions to Eden, he will be lost wandering in the wilderness forever. It was the same fate that had gone before in every Eden search of the past. But Zarins found a way around the impasse. His solution was to abandon his bible studies and turn instead to a more traditional academic discipline ... historical records. Zarins knew that the word Eden had come from the world's first civilization, the Sumerians. Sumer also happens to be the one place where two of the four biblical rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates touch. This offered Zarins and his group, another avenue to explore. The Sumerians were the world's first people to use writing. They created writing in order to make sure to know who got what, and from whom, where and when. Who paid taxes and who didn't. The Sumerians quickly found it was a useful tool to record ideas as well. Later on, they tried to write down their stories. One of those stories was of particular importance to the Eden project. A tale that quite possibly is the world's oldest written story is the epic of Gilgamesh. It has some shocking similarities to the story of Eden. Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk in Mesopotamia, was two-thirds God, and one-third man. That was a problem because he was therefore not immortal. Destined to once die, like those of us who are fully human, and overwhelmed with a sense of his own future mortality, he went on a quest to find the secret of immortality. In his search, Gilgamesh meets various characters who explained to him how humans came to be. The Sumerians talk about man being creative clay. Which makes sense there are river culture. Men were created out of clay, and women were made out of Men. You need to find that clay from a place where people live forever, a place that was really nice, and where nobody got sick. A place blessed by God. When compared to the story of Eden, this earlier creation story has a distinctly familiar ring. Adam too was created out of clay and Eve was created out of Adam's body. And the Sumerian idea of a land where there is no unhappiness, illness, or death as an obvious parallel to the garden of Eden itself. The one difference is that the Sumerians did not call their version of paradise Eden. They called it Dilmun. Dilmun refers to a specific place that was centered around current day Bahrain. It was a place with an abundance of blessings, all blessings of nature come together there. It was a place where you can live without worry. The similarities are uncanny. Even down to the way both Dilmun and Eden are eventually destroyed by a great flood. Man were created from clay to serve the gods. But men being men, they became annoying to the gods and the gods say, oh, we need to eliminate them. I will make it rain, and then there's a flood story. A few get saved. And they go on to then repopulate the earth in the Sumerian version of the story. The man who was saved and repopulates the earth was not called Noah. His name is Utnapishtim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim. He would save humanity. One remorseful God grants him the gift of eternal life. Gilgamesh is looking at this and saying, well, how do I get that? He's going to go search for it. Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtum, hoping the old man will reveal the secret of living forever. When they meet, Utnapishtim realizes that Gilgamesh is a hero worthy of immortality and tells him how to achieve it. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that the secret of immortality is for him to find the plants of life and to eat from it. He also tells Gilgamesh that the plant will be underwater in a place where paradise once stood. “That’s the land of Dilmun”. That’s the line the researcher were looking for. After an epic journey, Gilgamesh reaches Dilmun, but just when he has immortality within his grasp, disaster strikes. He finds this plant of life in the water. He is just going to grasp and consume it, but unfortunately for him, a serpent snatches it away first, and the serpent rejuvenate itself. This tale of humankind being offered the chance of eternal life only to have it snatched away is of course exactly the same fate that befalls Adam and Eve. There was a moral in this story that immortality is something just beyond human's grasp. And there was a similar theme in the garden of Eden story that the human beings were originally not barred from eating of the tree of life, but because they disobeyed God and consumed from the tree of knowledge, there are cast out of the garden, and lose the chance of eating of the tree of life. It’s clear that the story of Eden was nothing more than a Hebrew interpretation of the epic of Gilgamesh. It was the same because Adam and Eve were also punished by getting mortality, and they had to work for a living. When ancient Hebrews heard the Sumerian stories, they decided to make them their own and put them in the bible. The biblical story changed the Mesopotamian story in an important way. The Hebrews mono- theistalized it, they applied it to just one god. It was a cannibalizing of a pagan story and apply it to one god who brings the flood and delivers a flood hero. There is a good reason for the flood and that’s because of human sins. Unfortunately, the story itself did not seem to offer any obvious clues to Eden's location. It seemed like yet another dead end. But one thing was clear, Dilmun was the location of paradise. If he couldn't find Eden, perhaps he could find Dilmun. Zarins was not the first person to make the connection between Eden and Dilmun. Ever since the Sumerian language was first decrypted, scholars have suggested that the two places might somehow be linked. Dilmun is interesting because it’s an idealized paradise. A very special place that's very advanced, where civilization culture thrives. It would be like what … Atlantis! We have this mystery place where these incredible advances “happened”. If Dilmun was just a myth, a parabol, and had no basis in fact, then Eden too was never likely to have been a real place. Zarins however knew that Dilmun was not simply a figment of the imagination. It was a real place. In fact, he was the first person who discovered it in the 1970s. In the quest for Eden, Zarins found himself revisiting his earlier work. He went back in the field, going through all these places, looking for evidence of an early civilization’s stone tools. Zarins and his colleagues found evidence of a civilization, a string of trading centers that once thrived along the Eastern shores of Arabia. Today evidence of his culture can still be seen on the Arabian island of Bahrain. This discovery came as something of a surprise. Considering that today, the area is little more than a vast empty desert. It was a place where different people congregated, it was the ancient Hong Kong. People traded goods coming in from everywhere. Crucially, Zarins discovered that Sumerian traders had visited this land and recorded the name of it as Dilmun. The Sumerian cities became actively interested in trade, and Dilmun was the place to be. They traded for raw materials to bring that back to Sumar, make nice things out of it, and sold it back to them at a profit. As soon as the Samaritans started trading, bingo, they recorded the word Dilmun. But why would the Sumerians think of this (now desert) trading center as a paradise? The answer may lie with the distance between Dilmun and Sumar. It could only be reached by sea. Only sailors ever went there. Just like sailors throughout history, they brought home tales of this faraway land. Sailors don't talk about home, they talk about places they can impress people with. The Sumerian sailors must have told of a place that was not only rich and magnificent, but lush, unlike the dry hard land of Suma. Dilmun was rich, perfect and green. It's exotic to the Sumerians. Over time, Sumerians came to think of Dilmun a special place. So much so, they assumed it was the very place where humankind was first created. Zarins had started with a cryptic biblical legend. Archaeology had helped him discover that Dilmun was a real place. Yet still the Dilmun that Zarins discovered was nothing more than a desert trading outpost. They saw nothing to support the idea of it being green and beautiful. Another roadblock on the way to the garden of Eden. To get past it, Zarins gave up on the idea of scouring the historical record, and turned instead to hard science. His undergraduate work was in geology. He was also an anthropologist and an archaeologist. The quest for Eden turned to the physical landscape of Eastern Arabia and to the thorny question of the two missing rivers, the Gihon and the Pison. Where would you get two other rivers that could connect up with the Tigris and Euphrates? And that's where geology science comes in. The answer came, from all places, ... from the heavens. During the 80s, a revolutionary new technology became available: Satellite imagery. NASA had recently launched Landsat, the first satellite designed to photograph the planet. This was cutting edge technology. Zarins had a friend at NASA who gave him some early low resolution pictures. For the first time he and his students could see the land of Dilmun in a way that had literally never been seen before. A careful study of the images revealed a river! Dry channels snaking through Eastern Saudi Arabia. It clearly marked where a river would once float. As well as the Tigris and Euphrates, the Pison was visible. The river that originated in Northwest Saudi Arabia was later called the Arema. Saudi Arabia does not have any permanent rivers, but does have numerous Wadis (valley) which are riverbeds that are either permanently or intermittently dry. Most of them ended up in a huge delta near Kuwait. From the ground, the dry river channel of the Pison is all but impossible to see as nothing more than a slight depression in the sand. You certainly couldn't picture any lush and fertile ground. But Landsat images clearly showed this former river. When it was in full flow, the people of Dilmun would have had a perpetual water source. And there would have been plenty of food along the banks. It would have been a place of abundant life. And you realize that it dried up Riverbed, it was actually once a water source that changes the whole lay of the land. That was a Eureka moment. However, there was a problem. Something was missing. The place where the rivers connected to the Tigris and Euphrates showed no evidence of ever being the beautiful lush garden described in the bible story. And also, where was the fourth river, the Gihon. It looked like yet another dead end. He was looking for a place that may have existed 8-10,000 years ago. That was the end of the last ice age. All of Arabia was drained by three rivers after the ice age, in what they call the neolithic period. These rivers quickly dried up and they were not as extensive as the Pison. Obviously the landscape was changing dramatically afterwards. This element of timing is important for two reasons. When these river were still floating, the region of the Persian Gulf looked quite different from how it does today. In fact, at that time, there was no Persian Gulf. It was dry land. At the time, 8,500+ years back, there was also a land bridge connecting England with mainland Europe, called Doggerland. The Persian golf was, during the last ice age, completely dry land because the sea-level was about 60 meter lower, and the deepest part of the Gulf is 40 meter. The whole Persian Gulf area must have been a giant lush and green hunting area for humans. The same for Doggersland in Europe, the same for land around a much, much smaller Black Sea, the same for large parts of the Baltic Sea between Denmark and Sweden. Along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the US and Canada there would have been a lot of island which are now submerged, islands which allowed the first humans to arrive through Asia. Just as described in the bible, the rivers connected up in what is today Basra. 8,000 years ago, the climate of the region was totally different. At that time monsoon rains, which today only reached the Southern most tip of the Arabia, would have covered the whole peninsula with life giving rain. It was this rain that fed the Pision when its glaciers where gone. The monsoon rains allowed it to flow all year round. Obviously, the land around the river would not have been a harsh desert, the climate would have more looked like northern Europe today. Same for the Sahara desert, there it would have looked more like Spain and Italy today. With Russian and Iranian glaciers still slowly melting, wind flows from the north, would have given Arabia a European-like climate. That makes you wonder why people migrated into the harsh and cold climate of Europe at the time, but that’s another matter. So, Arabia would have been lush and green with the perfect weather. This is why the Sumerians thought of Dilmun as the birthplace of humanity, because it was kind of like a paradise. The wild lands of “Eden”. It would have been a step land with lots of vegetation, marshlands, bountiful of animals to hunt. Similar to some parts of southern Iraq today. It would have been the ideal, beautiful place to live. You got drinking water all year, you got resources, you got mud. It would have undoubtedly been Eden-like, but was this actually Eden? Without the fourth river, the Gihon, it couldn't be. The bible describes the Gihon as flowing through the land of Cush. For centuries most scholars believed Cush refer to an area in east Africa. In fact, the king James version of the bible even uses the word Ethiopia. But Zarins knew there was a different interpretation. Cush could also be a reference to the area around the Zagros mountains, located in modern day Iran. “The Gihon came out of the land of Cush”. Cush could be another word for Iran. As it happens, there is a major river that still flows out of the Zagros mountains. That river is called the Karun. It still carries water, and it comes out of the Zagros, until it was damned in the 1970s. It too, was connected with the Tigris and Euphrates, at the exact place where the now newly discovered Gihon should have joined up. These rivers formed the so- called four headwaters, that floats southward to form one great river. Zarins now believed this was the location of the garden of Eden. This last discovery was the final proof Zarins needed for his theory. Several times he was close to failure. It was only by combining his knowledge across so many disciplines that he was able to finally solve this ancient puzzle. This was not the end of the quest. The location of Eden was not the most important thing. He wanted to know how true the story in the bible was. And what it really meant? The story was not really about how the first human beings were created. Instead it was about how human society was created when we humans stopped being hunter gatherers and started becoming farmers. The garden of Eden is an explanation of why farming originated. Eden likely was not the only one of its kind. Zarins believes that the whole region, the land known as Dilmun was filled with Eden-like places. Eden was a home to prehistoric humans, hunter gatherers, who are able to survive purely from what they found growing naturally. But as the last ice age ended, the waters in the world's oceans began to rise. Eventually this garden of paradise would have been drowned in the flood. In its place today, we find the Persian Gulf. Was this flood sudden? If it was a quick flood, is that were the story of Utnapishtim or Noah came from? Or did the Persian Golf filled slowly over 100 or 200 years? The answer is both. During the last ice age, northern North America was covered by an ice sheet. This continental ice sheet formed during the period now known as the Wisconsin glaciation, and covered much of central North America between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago. As the ice sheet disintegrated, its melt-waters created an immense glacial lake. At its greatest extent, “Lake Agassiz” may have covered an area larger than any currently existing lake in the world (including the Caspian Sea). It was approximately the area of the Black Sea, or of Sweden. The lake drained and filled a number of times, each time raising the sea-level. Lake Agassiz was not the only glacial lake, there must have been countless smaller ones in North and South America, Europe, Russia, and all the elevated mountains around the world. Each one raising the seal-levels slowly. The last drainage of Lake Agassiz was known to have occurred very suddenly and very violently, when its giant ice dam broke around 8,200 years ago. That sudden flood is still visible in the landscape in Canada. This final drainage caused an estimated 2.8 m in global sea levels. Enough to cause a giant Tsunami that flooded Doggerland, and a wave large enough to suddenly flood the Persian Golf with Eden included. It has often been suggested that there was still a land bridge between Europe and Asia that blocked the Bosporus at Istanbul. In other words, the Black Sea was really a lake not connected to the sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean. It was suggested that the Agassiz Tsunami reached all the way to this land bridge and forced the Bosporus open, suddenly flooding the Black Sea. But research showed this didn’t happen. There is no sign of sudden sediment at the Black sea entrance. The Bosporus was already open, and the Black Sea filled up slowly with thousand of years of glacier melt-water, and not suddenly through a Tsunami. So, if the story of Noah had to come from somewhere else, it had to come from the Persian Golf Tsunami, from Eden. BTW, the Sumerians were building rounded boats from long grasses, and not elongated as shown here. With the materials they used, they would not be able to build anything near such large structures. Of course, if the Noah story were true, it would have been the largest incest event ever recorded. It would have been a genetic event very obvious in the genomes of all current species. Noah is fabricated, non of that is reported by medical publications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis There is one problem with this Eden story, though. People in Mesopotamia didn’t start to write stories until 3000 years after the flood. Modern humans can barely remember 2000 years of ancient history even with stories written down, and that only because christians kept on searching for any historical proof about Jesus they could find. If it weren’t for church organizations, who kept copying and copying all sorts of texts that may have been explaining just anything about christianity ... even the about 1% of ancient texts that survived, may have been lost. How could the people of Mesopotamia remember this giant and sudden flood for such a long time? It’s kind of weird to say for an atheist, but by the time the Hebrews wrote down the story, yet another 2000 years later, the flood had occurred 6000 years before. The floods forced humans to move northwards into the much harsher landscape of Mesopotamia. Although the climate was significantly better than it’s for Iraq today, there was no easy living compared to Eden. If people wanted food, they had to grow it themselves. They had to become farmers. And that meant inventing and using new technologies to cultivate the lands. These new inventions allowed the people to live closer together in communities. People started to change, they stared to specialize in certain trades. People who specialize, like tool makers or bakers, they can not grow all they need themselves, so they had to start to trade. Eventually a whole economy developed with trade routes between different communities. Scholars discovered that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 5400 and 5100 years ago), Egypt (around 5250), China (3200), and southern Mexico and Guatemala (2500). For Egypt, several scholars have argued that "the earliest solid evidence of Egyptian writing differs in structure and style from the Mesopotamian and must therefore have developed independently. The origins of writing appear during the start of the pottery-phase of the Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. They had to keep track of trades. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay circles. Later on, they were replaced by larger flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk, less than 5000 years ago, and soon after in various parts of the Near East. It was likely not the first, but the oldest known surviving story in the world was the Sumerian epic poem of “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”, which is about 3800 years old. We are talking around 4400 years after the great flood. Gilgamesh likely ruled somewhere between 4900 – 4350 years ago, but his story didn’t appear on the walls of buildings in Uruk until 2950 years ago (of course, it could have been disappeared from other places before, like a lot of ancient texts have been lost). No fragments have been found that can be carbon- dated, but experts believe the first book of the Torah, “Genesis”, should be around 2600 years old. Was it coincidence that the world was “6000 years old” for the Hebrews, because that’s 6000 years after the great flood? Zarins believed that the story of Eden was written as a lament for the extraordinary change in society: a yearning for the days of a simpler life. The advent of agriculture was not seen as a great leap forward by ancient cultures, but as a great sin: Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge, therefore they fell from grace. That means they transgressed against what God had provided. They should have known better. In 1987, the results of Zarins's work were published in Smithsonian magazine. But once he put his ideas in the public sphere, Zarins discovered that many academics rejected his ideas. The best argument they could come up with came, from all places, the bible: Genesis 2 says “the rivers flow out of Eden and become a forehead waters”. That implies that the river-flow was going from the higher area of Eden, down into the Persian Gulf area. “Zarins had located the garden of Eden at the wrong end”. “Even the ancient Hebrews knew that rivers don't flow upwards”. But with biblical experts being so embarrassed with this very simple and obvious good new explanation, you can not think other than they wished they had written the publication themselves. There was solid science behind Zarins’ findings. Perhaps most surprisingly was that this new interpretation was not rejected by many people with a more religious disposition. In fact, many welcomed Zarins work. You would have expected a backlash in the Bible belt. Backlash came from the scientific world, as has been the case numerous times before with ground breaking new discoveries. It took some decades for Lake Agassiz to become generally accepted. Surprisingly, Zarins spoke to many church groups. He was invited to public venues where you would've thought they would've been hostile to his ideas. But he was a good storyteller. He was not as offensive as your author here. He was in no way saying what you think is stupid if you still believe in Genesis. He gave them a way to look at Genesis with a scientific touch, to let their imaginary story be “real”. Although, of course, in fact, 90% of the Genesis fables are total fakes. The extraordinary work of Juris Zarins showed that the legend of the garden of Eden might have been more than just a parable. Parts of it might have been a true history. It was a story of how human society came to be, a story that eventually made its way into the bible, where is was collected as a whole book of fantastical fables. As for who was Jack the Ripper? I haven’t seen that ah-ha documentary or book yet. Considering his age, he may be in the afterlife, but let’s hope Juris Zarins will find the time to dig into that as well? ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins This article used large parts of the documentary “The Hunt for the Garden of Eden”. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4o6hxs