The Garden of Eden - ever given it much thought?

The Universe is approx., 13.7 billion years old, we have no idea what caused it to appear but our very best technology suggests it suddenly did and went through a number of dramatic changes which produced our little insignificant star and our own Earth about 4 billion years ago - Life didn't make even a primative appearance till 500 million years BP. Of course, I could be wrong and all of creation might have been completed in six days ( in quite an amazing a**e about face order too!) but I don't think many folk adhere to that story anymore.

However; it is nevertheless, very interesting to ponder on some areas of the myth version that could be hiding a truth or three. You may remember that the Old Guy with the beard who lives in a cloud, put the first man and woman in a wonderful garden that grew by itself - it didn't need any work whatsoever and Adam & Eve could partake whenever the mood took them (apart from when they weren't raising Caine! )

Now to me, that lifestyle sounds a bit like Hunter Gathering - the whole tribe trooped around following the rains or remembering where certain crops grew - with a high dependency on meat for protein ( our first ancestors used to clear up the scraps after the big predators had had their fill - we all loved marrowbones!)

This went on for millenia - until we developed a taste for grain, even the early stuff was very nutrious so it made sense. Quite suddenly, in the Middle East, probably between the Tigris and Euphates rivers, there appeared natural hybrid wheats and barley ( or was it God's first GM experiment?) It was wonderful stuff - the grain was bigger ( still flipping poor by our standards) and more of it - just one problem - the seeds fell off the ears naked. Meaning they either had to be planted by chance or a helping hand. The start of Farming.

You may have noticed how flippin' difficult gardening is - so imagine what it was like for Mid to Late Bronze Age folk who knew diddly about everything!

So when they came to modified their Creation Myths - they looked back to picking stuff off the trees as a Golden Age and being humans = it was ALL OUR FAULT!  And must have been some kind of terrible punishment - Gardening in a nutshell!