Verses 16 and 17:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
And God's proclamation of his curse on Adam in Genesis 3:19:
"By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return"
Prior to that, there is no biblical evidence of death. Only evidence of life.
I think you are misinterpreting Scripture. God says Adam will die the moment he eats from the tree, but after eating, Adam "lives," in a physical sense, but his work becomes toil (Gen 3:17). And yes, Adam then returns to the ground when he dies, separated from God. That doesn't mean literal death never happened before. It means Adam has chosen the fleshy over the spiritual, the earthly over the Godly -- and if he wants to live by the earth, then he will die by the earth, without God's presence in his life.