Searching for Eden

The search for Eden (the Garden of Eden is not where Adam and Eve lived, it is where the tree grew) is mostly concentrated in the Holy Land or for the science people around the Fertile Crescent (the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers). However, I think they should be looking South and West, in what is now the Saharan desert. If you think about it, my model fits with both scholarly and biblical accounts. Scientific evidence says that people came out of Africa, so why look for the place the myth talks about, in the place the myth was created, myths are historical accounts so you look at where the people came from, and since creation is always the first myth, it would be the oldest.
The Sahara wasn’t always a dessert it was once much wetter, and if we use the model of human induced desertification that is currently used to explain the conditions in the Middle East and the Southwest part of the US, we can see people were once there and chances are that it was once lush and green. (For those unfamiliar with the theory of human induced desertification, it basically says that a population of people if placed in a fragile area while eventual strip the land of so much vegetation and water that the process of creating a desert will be accelerated. The Middle East was once a huge, cedar forest that was stripped for fuel and building material. However, once the trees were gone, and the water diverted for agriculture, nothing else grew (forests grow on some of the poorest soils, since most of the nutrients are locked up in the trees and biomass, so if you cart away the nutrients as logs what is left?), so what top soil there was blew away and the earth baked in the sun, when the rains stopped coming. When the rains do come without soil and vegetation to slow the current the water doesn’t soak in, it washes to the sea in a torrent.)
Perhaps even the picking of the apple from the tree is not the metaphor we believe it to be; perhaps it is a metaphor for not taking too much from the land lest it fall into ruin, with the Garden of Eden and it fruit being a fragile environment. Remember the story we have isn’t the original version since apples are from Central Asia and weren’t know till much later in history. Perhaps the reason we have no knowledge of the fruit mentioned and have to sub in the apple is, because it is extinct.

Since we are pretty much already into the biblical stuff lets continue on that path. If you take the east exit from Saharan Africa, you end up in the Holy Land and what is more fitting as the fiery sword of GD to keep people from returning to Eden than a fiery desert. Even 8,000 years ago the dead were buried facing West, perhaps back towards a proto-Eden. A serpent with legs is a salamander, and salamanders only live in wet places, but snakes can live in dry places, so GD taking the serpents legs is again a metaphor for desertification. The punishment of Adam and Eve was they had to feed themselves and their growing family with agriculture, since the land would no longer sustain them, again all this points to desertification and Eden being in the Sahara. Eden is between four rivers, I just looked at satellite image of the Sahara and there are plenty of places where rivers flowed 30,000 years ago. So, again what is now the Saharan desert fits as the location of Eden, where man lived on bounty of the land, until GD drove him to a place where he could live, but only as the result of the sweat of his brow.

To end this little story I will state where this idea came from. Quite poetically it came to me in a dream.