One of the most dramatic biblical episodes is surely the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Earth's Paradise. The rabid God, throwing two poor innocents in the wild and uncoordinated nature, promising to one incredible labours and to the other atrocious pains in childbirth, is quite disturbing.
A real misfortune for us descendants of such wretched ones. But, let's analyze the origins and structure of the myth. Meanwhile, we must say that stories like this are present in cultures far older than the Jewish / Christian one, and in each of these there is the dichotomy between the wonderful and simple life of the former and the degradation, the hunger and the pain of the later.
The expulsion or the escape, are always consecutive to some terrible occurrence: a god disappointed and angry, or a cataclysm.
Something, in short, makes man's life impossible and forces him to flee, to change his habits. Moreover, in all these myths it is clearly said that paradise, or shangrilla, as it is called, is on Earth. But where? Researchers and adventurers of all ages have been trying to find the Garden of Eden, no one has ever found it. Perhaps the problem is not geographic, but temporal.
We hypothesize that the myth is much older than it has ever been believed. Shuffled by father to son orally, or indefinitely tied to the cellular memory itself, or even rooted in the most hidden meanders of the human unconscious, disguised in the loud crowd of our instincts. At this point we are catapulted in an ancient age, perhaps millions of years ago, a time when huge forests covered the valleys and plains of the central areas of the African continent, a time when our ancestors were just stretching their hands to seize a juicy fruit and bring it to the mouth.
And archeology comes to us. Studies on the fossil remains of our ancient progenitors reveal us a lot. Certainly, somebody doesn’t like the idea to descend from a being covered with hair, about a meter high, but those that until a few decades were just theories, are now widely demonstrated. Perhaps, we may have doubts about ancestral forces that have pushed or even push genetic mutations to change and evolve species, but the phylogenetic that rebuilds the human genealogy tree is now out of the question