Eden A Poetic Rendition of Reality What if both interpretations are, in a very real sense, true? Could it be that it is a poetic rendition of something that really happened? Can one find in the Eden stories a transition of humankind from Paleolithic to Neolithic — from a hunter/gatherer culture to that of modern civilization? Memories of a mythical paradise are universal. The old days always seem to have been better than the present. The Eden story carries on this tradition. It harks back to the beginning when humans were one with nature. But in one sense, buried in the text might be an actual dimly remembered past of an epoch that goes back at least 200,000 years, maybe even longer, to the emergence of anatomically modern humans. In the Eden story, these first humans are given names – Adam and Eve.