Recently I have become interested in early human history, and naturally this lead me to focus on ancient and stone age middle eastern history. One of the things I looked into were ancient origin stories, and of course the most well known of these is the Hebrew Book of Genesis. I found that it contained many similarities with the Sumerian origin story. Both claimed to be from an even older land/civilization to the west that had been flooded. They described it as lush and fertile, and of course this land was Eden. Eden is also a Sumerian word, meaning "fertile land". So I believe that the Persian Gulf was this land, this Garden of Eden. Because the Persian Gulf didn't even use to exist. It was a lush land filled with many rivers, a large oasis in the middle of the deserts, a perfect stopping point for early human travellers from Ethiopia. And when these lands began to flood with the melting of the ice caps and the same global warming that allowed for griculture, the people simply followed the fertile land that remained, they followed the rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Some even went further into the Levant, all the way to Egypt, the Hebrews. This theory is explained in further detail, with visual aids, here. But then where did the Egyptians come from? Obviously early humans from Ethiopia travelled along the Nile, but modern historians believe that many more of them lived in the middle of the Sahara desert. The Sahara as we know it was not how it always was. The largest desert in the world didn't even used to be a desert. There were many large mega-lakes, larger than any modern lakes, right in the middle of it, and fertile land surrounding them. Furthermore, there is evidence that these people were civilized, with tools and settlements. But alas, these civilizations were destroyed by environmental collapse and had to resettle, in the Nile. These lakes are thought to have disappeared only a few thousand years ago. This might even help us explain how and why civilization developed. Imagine living in Eden, and your whole world being changed by massive flooding. Or in the Sahara, and your civilization being swallowed by the desert. It would very much be the apocalypse. Massive amounts of refugees would wander into Mesopotamia or Egypt and settle there. All of a sudden you have thousands of new people in an area. And you need to organize them. This of course led to city-states, and then civilization as we know it. Very interesting stuff if you ask me. Is anyone else interested in stone age history or pre-history?
Except for the red sea was formed by a divergent plate boundary and the Persian gulf was formed by subduction of the Arabian plate beneath the Eurasian plate... Humans weren't around until after all this happened. They came to the Levant because it was one of the few fertile areas in the region.
Until about 30,000 BCE sea levels were high enough that most of the persian gulf simply didn't exist. From that point it began to grow as sea levels rose, and the area thought to be Eden (as shown in the attached map.) flooded between 6000 and 5000 BCE, leading to the creation of the Sumerian civilization at the City of Eridu.
