Return to Eden

Wow. Read this news story. Archaeologists are excavating the world's oldest temple - built in 10,000 BC! That's 8,000 years before Stonehenge and some four thousand years older than the entire world (if 'young earth creationists' are to be believed).

But the thing that really intrigues me is that the temple appears to tell the 'Garden of Eden' story in sculpture form - is the carving on the right really a representation of the 'serpent' before it was cursed and lost its limbs?

I know that some biblical scholars are pretty convinced that the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 2v8 - 3v24) is the oldest story in the bible (some say at least a thousand years older than the creation story in Genesis 1), but here we appear to have it about 6,000 years earlier than I thought it was supposed to be. Wow.