Mystery of Bible's legendary Garden of Eden river finally solved after 1.6m years

 Scientists say they have finally cracked a million-year-old mystery surrounding the legendary river tied to the Bible's Garden of Eden. The Euphrates River is famously named in the Book of Genesis as one of the four sacred waterways flowing through the paradise home of Adam and Eve.

But despite its starring role in holy scripture and the rise of humanity's earliest empires, experts have spent decades scratching their heads over how the iconic 1,900-mile-long river actually formed.

A team of eagle-eyed researchers now claim to have solved the ancient puzzle, rewriting the history books by mapping the waterway's secret past for the first time.

For generations, the true origins of the Euphrates remained buried deep beneath layers of ancient muck and hidden by millions of years of violent tectonic shifts. To break the deadlock, scientists used a mix of seismic imaging, satellite tracking, geological mapping and deep-sea sediment pulled from the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Their analysis revealed that two completely separate mega-rivers - dubbed the Paleo-Karasu and the Paleo-Murat - once sliced across what we now know as Turkey and Syria. It wasn't until a massive geological shake-up around 1.6 million years ago that the two giants smashed together, changing direction and forging the modern Euphrates we see today.

The Euphrates is the longest river in Western Asia, snaking through the famous "Fertile Crescent." The legendary region is widely called the cradle of civilisation, acting as an oasis of rich soil in a scorching desert that allowed superpowers like the Sumerians and Assyrians to thrive 6,000 years ago.

Before the breakthrough, many theories were put forward about the river's birth. Some experts argued it started as a lone stream dumping into the Mediterranean or ancient Turkish lakes, while others guessed it emptied out somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.

The new study, published in Nature Geoscience, blows the old theories out of the water. It reveals the Paleo-Murat was first established more than 16.5 million years ago, followed by the Paleo-Karasu between 8.6 and 5.9 million years ago.

But around 5.3 million years ago, an apocalyptic event rocked the planet. The bottleneck between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean clogged up near modern-day Gibraltar, causing the Mediterranean Sea to effectively dry up.

As water levels plummeted by over a mile, rivers across the globe began violently slicing deeper into the earth. At the same time, shifting tectonic plates tilted the landscape, triggering catastrophic floods as mountaintop lakes overflowed.

The team discovered that the mega-floods left behind massive debris scars, known as the Handere and Nahr Menashe deposits. A similar phenomenon was spotted off the coast of Libya, where a giant ancient river deposit called the "Eosahabi fan" was dumped.

Millions of years of grinding tectonic action eventually forced the Paleo-Murat and Paleo-Karasu onto a collision course. When they finally collided 1.6 million years ago, they created the holy river that would go on to shape human history.