Was sin necessary for knowledge?

[pocaracas]

Multiple instances of parallel independent construction.

Or passed down from the beginning. Just depends on your world view.

Reality does not depend on the world view, does it?
What really happened, back then, may be lost to us, as it happened before the written word. But, from our present point of view, we can make educated guesses as to what happened, based mostly on archeology, but also anthropology, biology and psychology.

Evolution suggests that mankind appeared out of social apes. Such social groups, as can be seen presently with Chimps, Bonobos and Gorillas... even Capuchin Monkeys!, already have a sense of right and wrong, of fairness, of loyalty, of reciprocity and other traits that we attribute to a moral agent, even if they don't have a language to articulate those.
If we had these traits prior to being humans, then it renders the religious story false (as it couldn't have been passed down from the beginning, given that there was no language to pass it down with) and also provides us with the one tool to understand why these traits feel so ingrained within most of us... so ingrained that we cannot intuitively say from where they came... so ingrained that they seem to have been bestowed upon us since before birth... but how? enter the great gap filler.

Here, this guy has a very interesting 15 minute TED talk on the subject: