- Tonight, the search for the biblical birthplace of man.
- God created Adam and Eve and placed them
in this Garden of Eden that no one knows exactly
where it’s located.
- Is the Garden of Eden a tale to explain human creation,
or could it be a real place?
- The three major Western religious traditions,
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism,
all say it existed.
- All the way from Genesis through the Gilgamesh Epic,
for some 4,000 years, we have a memory of a place like Eden.
- If the Garden of Eden did exist, where was it?
Now, we explore the top theories surrounding the location
of this paradise on earth.
- Genesis talks about four rivers that come together.
- If we can kind of chart out where those rivers are,
maybe we can find out
where the Garden of Eden was actually located.
- 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.
- This is the search for the Garden of Eden.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- God plants trees, beautiful trees,
good for Eden, all around the garden,
and in the middle of the garden,
he plants the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
- 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."
- 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.
- [Laurence] According to the account in Genesis,
Adam and Eve cover their nakedness
by fashioning fig leaves into loin cloths.
- 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.
- And this changes everything.
God says, "This paradise you can no longer have."
- 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.
- [Laurence] But where on Earth did this biblical story
of man’s expulsion from paradise take place?
Where can we locate the Garden of Eden?
- For those who are determined to find the physical location
of the Garden of Eden, they will turn to Genesis.
- 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] It is written in Genesis
that a river went out of Eden to water the garden,
and from thence, it divided and became four headwaters.
- 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.
- According to the biblical text,
the Garden of Eden is East,
and so you have to think about the vantage point of those
who were writing.
And for some of those who were writing,
pushing towards the East and thinking
in terms of two of the rivers that are outlined,
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.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] In ancient times,
Iraq was part of a land 500 miles East of Israel,
known as Mesopotamia.
- 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 archeologists have established
were the first cities in human history,
such as Ur, were built
within this fertile space between the two rivers.
- 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.
- It was a fruitful location.
It produced a great deal just like the Garden of Eden.
- [Laurence] And there’s one town
within this once vibrant region
that claims to be the location of the Garden of Eden.
- This is the town of Al Qurnah.
Al Qurnah is about 60 miles North
of the city of Basrah in Southern Iraq.
It’s between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
It’s a place then that certainly Christian archeologists
and scholars in the 19th century,
very much began to associate
with the place where the real Eden might have been located.
- In Al Qurnah, we have a sign that says,
"The tree of Adam,"
purporting to be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
- Even today, in Al Qurnah,
local Iraqi Christians and Muslims still go on pilgrimage
to the tree of Adam.
- [Laurence] But it’s doubtful a tree could live that long.
Science tells us that the oldest living tree,
an ancient bristle cone pine in California,
is a little over 5,000 years old.
For Al Qurnah’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.
- Dr. Juris Zarins, 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,
Zarins sees an area of kind of these wads,
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 gonna 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.
- 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.
- Dr. Juris Zarins,
an archeologist from Missouri State University,
he 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.
- [Laurence] And today, much of this area of Iraq
is nothing like the lush paradise described in Genesis.
- We need to understand that this was a long, long time ago
and with the Ice Age, there were really profound shifts.
- From Zurins’ perspective,
as the 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.
- He notes that the people who lived
in that area were hunter-gatherers
who had to move as the waters rose.
- So Zurins presumes that the people
who were living in the place now covered by seawater,
would’ve moved Northwest
into the Tigris and Euphrates river basin
that we’re familiar with today.
- 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, because there was a world before the flood
and there was a world after.
- [Laurence] 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?
- 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.
- [Laurence] The Bible describes the Garden of Eden
as a land of lush vegetation,
filled with animals and abundant food,
a true paradise on earth.
But where on Earth exactly?
- There’s four rivers coming out of Eden
to water the garden.
So you can see the garden in the center of Eden
and four rivers coming from Eden into it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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."
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] 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.
- As the Book of Kings tells it,
the Jerusalem temple was built by King Solomon
in about 1000 BCE, that is before the time of Jesus.
- We know a little bit about this temple, it’s rectilinear,
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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Is it possible the ancient biblical author
had the temple in mind when describing Eden?
- What’s interesting about how the tabernacle
and the temple are constructed
and you know, the story of the Torah,
is that there’s an immense amount of garden imagery.
- 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 of the Covenant, two cherubim.
- 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.
- 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
for the Garden of Eden,
and think about it in terms of just being a metaphor.
- Could the Garden of Eden story have been
actually just sort of a metaphor for Jerusalem
and the most important building in Jerusalem,
which was the Jewish temple?
- [Laurence] It is 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Could it be
that the Garden of Eden’s story is a metaphor
for the exile of the Jews from Israel,
and the loss of the great temple where God and man coexisted?
- 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.
- 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 chapters of the Book of Genesis,
that is God communing
with human beings, disobedience, exile.
- And there’s also some really strong themes
about why we might have lost the Garden of Eden,
that there’s gonna 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- Even in science publications,
there’s discussion of the Garden of Eden
as a metaphor of the origin of humans.
- [Laurence] If the garden of Eden’s story is an explanation
of human creation, then logically,
might the real paradise be found in the cradle of humankind?
- 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.
- 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.
(dramatic music)
- 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.
- [Laurence] In 2019, a scientific breakthrough ushers
in a new theory about the birth of homo sapiens.
- 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Using mitochondrial DNA,
Dr. Hayes sought to trace back the genetic timeline
to the exact spot where modern humans first emerged.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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,
long-standing presence of humans and a lush environment.
- 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 Makgadikgadi.
- [Laurence] Based on the fossil record,
this wetland was home to an abundance of fish, birds,
and other animals large and small.
- Around 130,000 years ago, Lake Makgadikgadi dried up
and the people who were living in that area
would’ve 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- It’s a tremendously complex question
where human beings originated from
and we just don’t know the answer yet.
- 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?
(dramatic music)
- There’s a shepherd who was 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.
- 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 potbellied hill.
- By 1995, a year later,
this site has caught the interest
of international archeologists,
and there’s a dig there that is initiated
by a German archeologist by the name of Klaus Schmidt.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- Gobekli Tepe is really a series of temple structures.
At the center of each one of these structures,
are two massive, T-shaped monoliths.
- They’re massive, they’re 16 feet high,
they weigh tons.
And the most mind-blowing thing is how old it is.
- [Laurence] The carbon dating results appear
to fundamentally change the timeline of human civilization.
- 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- There seems to be some consensus
that what we have at Gobekli Tepe
could reflect a very complex mythology.
- [Laurence] These serpent carvings aren’t the only
possible connection to the Book of Genesis.
- 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 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,
and indeed the earliest of the Neolithic peoples
who made that transition from hunter-gathering
to living in cities in that region of Northern Mesopotamia,
and what is now Southeastern Turkey.
- And now, this is pre-agrarian Gobekli Tepe,
but according to Schmidt,
the site marks this kind of transition of hunter-gatherers
as a culture into an agrarian society.
- So when we think about the Garden of Eden mythology,
it represents a world before the rise of agriculture.
- Maybe this Garden of Eden story
about these primordial hunter-gatherers, right?
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.
- [Laurence] While archeologists 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.
- The Sumerians invented irrigation systems
that made that part of the world fertile and lush for them.
- The Sumerians were the first agriculturists.
They were the first people to grow food.
- [Laurence] The Sumerians also developed
the oldest known written language in the world.
- They were able to actually
write down their great mythologies.
These stories were able to be spread beyond the boundaries
of the Sumerian empire.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
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.
It’s not a place any human being can ever really find.
- 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.
- [Laurence] In the late 19th century,
a new theory emerges placing the Garden of Eden
in one of the most unlikely locations imaginable.
- 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.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Warren lives in an era
when new scientific evidence begins
to reveal that before the Ice Age,
the Earth was not as cold.
- If we look at a world that is much, much older
than maybe we had thought it was before,
we’re suddenly gonna see changes in glaciation.
We’re gonna see changes in geologic record
that suggests 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
that we had before.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- Warren was looking for a place for the Garden of Eden.
He presumed that you needed one
where we had lots and lots of sunlight,
a better place than the North Pole.
- [Laurence] 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.
- There is 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 this with 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Warren connects that ancient Ice Age migration
from the North Pole to stories of man’s expulsion from Eden.
- For Warren, as he looks
at these traditions around the world,
and he sees them as evidence
of a memory 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.
- It’s important to recognize in the 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.
- ’Til his dying day at age of 96,
Warren maintained the Garden of Eden was at the North Pole.
- [Laurence] However, skeptics point out
that the period when the North Pole had a tropical climate,
predates the rise of man.
- What he points to in terms of
that area being able to support robust life,
we’re talking about roughly 50 million years ago.
- There wasn’t really anything like a human
or even a monkey or an ape at that time.
- [Laurence] And there’s another factor
that makes Warren’s theory less likely.
- The North Pole itself is really just ice
through and through.
If you melt it away, there’s no ground there. (chuckles)
- 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,
now, we’re gonna watch Warren’s theory,
quite literally melt away.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- Joseph Smith says that, you know,
God, the Son, and the Father came to him in a vision,
and also the Angel Moroni came to him as well.
And told him that all these other churches were wrong.
- [Laurence] 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.
- Joseph Smith said that these golden plates were written
in an otherwise unknown language
he called reformed Egyptian.
- [Nicola] And he spends some years
translating these golden plates,
and that’s how we get the Book of Mormon.
- 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.
- 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 BC.
- [Laurence] According to Mormon belief,
an Israelite named Lehi
journeyed with his family from the Middle East
to the Americas around 600 BC.
- Some church leaders teach
that during the great biblical flood,
humanity on the ark was carried back across the ocean
to the Middle East.
- [Laurence] As Smith builds his following,
he claims to have another visit from God on July 20, 1831.
- According to Mormon history,
in this revelation, God shows him the real location
of the Garden of Eden.
- God reveals to him that
the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually in Mesopotamia.
- Although Smith didn’t name the location
in his translation, he told many early followers of his
where the site actually was.
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- 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 argued 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.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] According to Mormon tradition,
Adam built two altars in this Missouri Garden of Eden,
an altar of sacrifice and an altar of prayer.
- 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.
- [Laurence] 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 ended up going a little bit north
and settling just to the north of Missouri.
- [Laurence] Smith and his flock settled
in Nauvoo, 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.
- 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.
- [Laurence] Official Mormon teaching
hasn’t abandoned the idea
that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri.
- 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-Ondi-Ahman,
which is translated the Valley of God Where Adam Dwelt.
So Joseph Smith has suggested
that Adam will return to this place, Adam-Ondi-Ahman,
in order to prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus.
- [Laurence] 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.
- 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.
And 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 wanna know, we want this to also be part of our story.
And so that’s why I think we’re asking this question.
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- 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.
I’m Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching "History’s Greatest Mysteries."
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