[Modernman]

I don't know about the rest of you, but my ansetors[sp] came from the Garden of Eden!

Do you have any evidence to support this claim, other than the Bible?

[TMSuchman]

No, I don't. Just my faith. And for my family & I that is enough.

[ZULU]

A better question would be what did those ancestors look like and where was the Garden of Eden.

Biblical fundamentalists make a fundamental error when they seek to literally interpret a tome which is full of allegory and symbolism and requires a degree of intelligent thought, in light of facts currently known, to accurately assess its meaning in many cases - especially when subjects in the Bible are not central to the theme of the book.

The Bible is a theological work with historical overtones. It is neither a history book nor a biology text.

[CobaltBlue]

One version of the Out of Africa theory has our African ancestors crossing into the Middle East - Israel, the Sinai, Iraq - and then spreading East and West from there, so maybe his ancestors DID come from the Garden of Eden - if by that he means a place located in the Middle East.

I think the evidence is very compelling that everybody whose mitochondrial DNA has been studied so far is descended from a few people in Africa maybe 100,000 years ago, but I also think it's theoretically possible for earlier ancestors to have evolved elsewhere, spread to Africa, hit some kind of bottleneck there, and died off everywhere else.

So, I have no problem at all when someone wants to argue Garden of Eden, or even Adam and Eve. Speaking metaphorically, in some sense, they could be right.