Original subtitles

- 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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