Scientists have found evidence that appears to confirm the Bible's first ever man and woman 'actually existed'.
The Bible's Book of Genesis is a creation myth that describes how humankind was created by God.
The story documents how Adam and Eve were made from dust, with Adam being created on the sixth day, going on to make Eve from one of his ribs.
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The duo lived in the Garden of Eden - up until Eve caved into eating forbidden fruit which saw them banished from paradise and forced into a world of good and evil.
While the biblical story is believed by Christians to present the start of human life on Earth, others have found the story difficult to believe.
Initially, science found ancestors who passed on the male Y chromosomes and female mitochondrial DNA lived tens of thousands of years apart.
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However, scientists have now found evidence that suggests all humans alive today do come from the same ancestor.
The 'Mitochondrial Eve', a type of genetic material passed from moms to their children, can supposedly be traced in all of our DNA.
Geneticists traced this DNA to figure out when the lineage started, and found it was around 200,000 years ago.
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And researchers at the University of Sassari in Italy suggest Adam lived 180,000 to 200,000 years ago through similar studies to the Y-chromosome - placing the pair at around the same time in history.
Dr Joshua Swamidass, a biologist from Washington University, has argued that humanity could've sparked from a single couple, as the evidence of the Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam appears to show.
Dr Swamidass wrote in an article published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith: "Many individuals are each individually ancestors of 'all the living'.
"All humans alive descend from each of these universal ancestors. The same can be said for all alive in AD 1, or all alive when recorded history begins.
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"Two of them could be a particular couple, named Adam and Eve in scripture, from whom we all descend."
While the doc didn't exactly say Adam and Eve were the sole parents of humankind, the theory of evolution doesn't rule out their existence either, The Daily Mail reports.
Yet making the Biblical story fit through the lens of science requires abandoning much of the original story, such as the belief that God made Adam and Eve in the first place - and if our ancestors were human beings.
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As Dr Swamidass notes, Homo Sapiens were not the first humans on Earth. Consider that there were other human species such as Homo habilis who lived around 1.9 to 1.9 million years ago.
Still, some scientists now also believe Eden could be a real location where civilisation began.
Archaeologists have pinpointed the Bible's precise description of Eden could have actually been the historical Mesopotamia, what is known today as eastern Syria, northwest Turkey and a large chunk of Iraq, reports the Daily Star.
Professor Eric Cline, a classical and biblical archaeologist from George Washington University argued in his book, From Eden to Exile, that the evidence aligns with the scriptures.
He wrote: "This makes some sense from a textual point of view.
“Not only does the biblical account say that the garden lay 'in the east', meaning to the east of Israel, but it also mentions the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in connection with the Garden of Eden.”
However, some scientists believe the Kalahari Desert in Africa is the 'ancestral homeland of all humans alive today'.
Topics: History, Religion, Science, Technology, Washington, World News
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