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May I pass on to you all the following link to an article
Do these mysterious stones mark the site of Garden of Eden?
which refers to archeological disoveries at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. Condensed, it says that the religious significance of the place, ca 10,000 BC, caused people to gather there and develop agriculture. Memory of the rigours of agriculture, and the resulting ecological crash, is preserved in the early chapters of Genesis.
There is nothing in this article which so much as smacks of "Creation Science" (ضرطة كبيرة عليه), but neither does it give ground to the "Concoctionism" which views the Biblical accounts as having been been "cooked up" to serve a purpose, or to the disastrous "Higher Criticism" that the Germans developed in the 19th century.
But does this mean, asks the Hedgehog, that the Fall of Man may have been brought about through religion?
There has been a lot of controversy since the site's discovery about the significance of the 'pictograms' to the invention of writing. It is also in what, to me, is a geologically interesting area. Check out Google Earth and look at the contours followed by the trees, for example.
This, to me, is much more interesting than the hydrotheological debates that it has engendered about Eden and the Noachian flood. People with agendas really enjoy it when scientists use biblical metaphors. :)
Sir Mortimer Wheeler