The scientist in the History Channel program about the Garden of Eden and about the flood, is the archaeologist named Juris Zarins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins says the following regarding his idea. "Zarins argued that the Garden of Eden was situated at the head of the Persian Gulf (present-day Kuwait),
where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers run into the sea, from his
research on this area using information from many different sources,
including LANDSAT images from space. In this theory, the Bible's Gihon River would correspond with the Karun River in Iran, and the Pishon River would correspond to the Wadi Batin river system
that once drained the now dry, but once quite fertile central part of
the Arabian Peninsula. His suggestion about the Pishon River is
supported by James A. Sauer (1945–1999) formerly of the American Center of Oriental Research[10] although strongly criticized by the archaeological community."
https://mormonheretic.org/2015/07/13/atheist-find-garden-of-eden/ says that Zarins is an atheist! That web page mentions many of the things I saw in the History Channel program. That includes the following (as quoted from the above website).
"Researcher Juris Zarins from Missouri State University noted that every
civilization has had a creation story, and some of the stories pre-date
the story told in Genesis. He wondered why so many cultures tell this
story, and wondered if the Garden of Eden may have actually existed. He
noted that the Bible story bears remarkable resemblances to the Epic of
Gilgamesh. Some
of the details are quite similar to the story of Adam and Eve. He felt
the Bible stories were plagiarized by the Hebrews who heard these
stories from the Sumerians who have an older creation story that is 8000
years old.
... There are other Sumerian tales found in the Bible, such as The Tower of
Babel. Sumer is called Shinar in the Bible. Many of these early Bible
stories bear remarkable resemblances to more ancient Sumerian tales.
Zarins believes that the Bible is just a Hebrew version of the story of
Gilgamesh, and believes that Eden is the same place as Dilmun. He also
knows that the eastern shores of Arabia, near Bahrain was once a lush
area, even though today it is a desert.
... Everyone knows where the Euphrates River is, and Hiddekel is translated Tigris in most other translations.
Ethiopia may be a mistranslation. The word is actually Cush, and some
other Bibles translate it as Sudan, but Zarins noted that Iran was also
known as Cush. Geographically, Iran makes much more sense than either
Sudan or Ethiopia. ... If one can find these two other rivers (Pison and Gihon), they’ll find
Eden. Interestingly, only the Bible mentions these other two rivers. ...
Zarins turned to Satellite photos to try to find these other two
rivers. In the 1980s, satellite photos were hard to come by, but Zarins
lucked out. He noted a dry channel in Saudi Arabia. On the ground, it
looks just like a bunch of sand dunes and hardly looks like a river.
Zarins learned that this river had water as the Ice Age was ending.
Around 5-6000 BC, the area would have been lush with vegetation.
The Persian Gulf didn’t exist in the Ice Age and was once dry land.
During the Ice Age, the sea level was 200 feet deeper. Due to the
runoff, the Gulf filled with water, and is just 120 feet deep at it’s
deepest point. Zarins believes this river is the Pison, which flowed
much further east near Basra.
Zarins believes the fourth major river comes out of Zagros Mountains
in Iran, called Karun. It originally connected to the Tigrus and
Euphrates rivers until it was dammed in the 1970s. The Garden of Eden
is now under water in the Persian Gulf. 8000 years ago, the climate was
different, monsoon rains covered whole peninsula with rain, lush,
green, so Sumerians thought Dilmun was the birth of humanity.
Zarins thinks that the Tree of Knowledge was actually a story of
how farming started. The narrator says,
According to Zarins, the Garden of Eden was the home to
pre-historic humans, hunter-gatherers who were able to survive purely
from what they found growing naturally. But as the last Ice Age ended,
the waters in the world’s oceans began to rise. Eventually this garden
of paradise drowned in the flood. In its place today, we find the
Persian Gulf."
Not all of the stories of the Bible are 100% fiction. Some the biblical stories contain remnants of truth and those remnants of truth can help scientists find further knowledge of what happened in very ancient times!
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Book%20Reviews2005-/3-13.html (a web page of a scientific organization of Christian old Earth creationist scientists, or at least of Christians that are creationist scientists which includes old Earth creationists, even day age creationists) says the following. "Juris Zarins,
now retired from Southwest Missouri State University, conducted years of field
research in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. He contends that Semitic languages
arose in an Arabian nomadic setting during a period of changing climate. In an
aside to his scholarly work, Zarins proposes that the garden story is based on
the migrations around 5000 BC of these foraging nomads to Mesopotamia where
agriculture already flourished. The resulting cultural upheaval led to an oral
tradition taking the nomadic standpoint, which portrayed agriculturists as
taking God’s knowledge into their own hands to exploit the power of creation. As
the Gulf continued to rise, the agriculturists were forced out of Eden. Using
LANDSAT photos, archaeology, linguistics, and geology, he situates Eden
underneath the present Persian Gulf. Wilensky-Lanford considers this the most
credible garden theory, although it has not been embraced in academia as
contemporary scholars show little interest in the geography of literal
creation."
