Reading Peter Gelderloos' Worshipping Power (a fascinating dive into the history of societal structures all around the world) got me thinking of another possible historical origin for the Christian garden of Eden myth.

Maybe...

Garden of Eden => A society of hunter/gatherers living for thousands of years in a wilderness that produces more food than they need without labor-intensive cultivation.

Knowledge of Good and Evil => Certainty about what is good and what is evil set down by a centralized, organized religion. Having one hierarchical power structure (the book shows) makes it easy to create more. Then you've got a state.

Blaming it on just Eve => An end to egalitarian relations between the genders, and the start of patriarchy.

Cursing men with field labor => A change from hunter/gatherer to serf-farmer. You cannot leave your land and it requires constant back-breaking labor to produce enough food. Or rather, your owners will always demand as much in taxes as they can, so your labor will never be enough.

Cursing women with childbearing => A change from the hunter/gatherer one-child-every-four-years norm to the peasant woman one-child-each-year norm. No time to heal, and you'll be breastfeeding while pregnant, always tired and in pain, in order to produce as many new laborers as possible.

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The cost of certainty is something I have a growing interest in.

Such as the cost in education of using more and more standardized tests to measure student knowledge.