There's no need to go searching for the "real" Noah and an "actual" flood in the distant past. It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains come up with flood myths that explain the destruction and rebirth of civilizations because they saw floods and rebuilding on a fairly regular basis. Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth. Sometimes even building a boat to save the animals because the gods told him. IMO, it's almost certain that the ancient Hebrews picked up on one (or more) of these myths and incorporated it into their own culture.
> Ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, etc. all have flood myths that are strikingly similar to the Noah myth.
Not sure about the others, but at least the Chinese "flood myth", the legend of Yu the Great, is qualitatively different from the Noah myth. It involves non-cataclysmic, recurring floods that the "government" wanted to control. There was no saving animals on a big boat and restarting civilization. It basically involved a big engineering project of directing water flow to where it's needed.
The Noah flood myths seem to describe floods of a much scarier kind, the kinds that have the potential to wipe out civilizations, as opposed to ones happening on a "fairly regular basis". Given that sea water levels rose tens of meters during the Younger Dryas (that's what google tells me at least), it seems conceivable that the movement of such massive amounts of water during these periods would have given rise to such stories.
Civilization to early man was not global, it was local. And yes, the Chinese myth you mention doesn't include a guy saving animals on a boat. But the indian Manu and Matsya myth does. As does the Ziusudra myth and the Gilgamesh flood myth of the Sumerian. And the And the Videvdad of ancient Iran, and the Pu Sangkasa-Ya Sangkasi of ancient Thailand (though here it's a giant magical gourd rather that a ship), and many many more.
What is common is that "everything" gets destroyed, a few survive to rebuild.
> It seems that most early civilizations that developed on alluvial flood plains...
I'd go even further: there is no human habitat at all where floods are not dangerous catastrophes. The coast and alluvial plains trivially so, but mountains and deserts, too.
I might be misunderstanding your point, but Egyptian civilisation was entirely based on the flooding of the Nile bringing fertility to the farmlands. It wasn't a dangerous catastrophe, it was a benevolent event that was celebrated with religious feasts etc dedicated to Isis iirc (long time since I read my Egyptian mythology).
My point wasn't that each flood has always been detrimental, but that there has never been a collection of people living in a place where there aren't also dangerous floods that kill people, so wild stories of floods destroying the world aren't really far out for the lived experience (perhaps across a few generations) of any human ever.
Got it. Yes indeed. That makes total sense and I agree.
Also at some point in prehistory the rock formation that is now the strait of Gibraltar fractured and the Atlantic ocean rushed in and drowned the entire basin of the Mediterranean,[1] so that type of cataclysm has actually occurred, although before human experience
