For thousands of years people have been reading about a worldwide flood, from the biblical story of Noah and his ark and from such Middle Eastern myths as the Epic of Gilgamesh, which seems to be an earlier version of the same. But away from these more specific tales, almost every culture that has left a record seems to have recorded a story of a great flood.
Creation Myths
One of the common threads in all cultures view of its past is the Creation Myth. Before science was able to explain the ever-evolving nature of life on this planet, ancient cultures needed to identify a starting point for their own line of history. In the bible it is obviously Adam and Eve, in South America it is Virochoca or Kon-Tiki and the list is endless. In many cases it is not a need to explain the very starting point of all mankind, just the rise of the culture itself. Flood myths provide an ideal tool for this; all other men are wiped from the earth in a fit of rage by the gods leaving just one small group of worthy survivors to become the progenitors of the race in question. From this viewpoint flood stories as creation myths are a very common reoccurrence in mythologies around the world. But is there more to it than that?
A World Wide View
There is one event that did subject the planet on a global scale to increased flooding and natural disasters and that was the retreat from the last Ice Age. About 17000 years ago the last Ice Age begin to retreat. The massive glaciers that sat across northern Europe and northern America began to melt. So much water was held in these ice formations that the sea level at this point would have been about 115m lower than it is today. This would mean that many low lying and coastal areas would have been exposed and more extensive than they are today. If the ice melt down had been a gradual process then the coastal communities would have been able to easily predict this gradual rise in water level and it would not have been regarded as a major problem. The melt down, however, as a chaotic process and many glaciers (particularly the massive Laurentide ice sheet of North America) melted from the inside outwards. This caused a massive lake of water to appear held back by an ever decreasing ice dam which when it finally burst through ejected millions of tons of water immediately into the worlds oceans. Many coastal areas would have witnessed devastating floods in a matter of days. Add to these disastrous floods the fact that the rapid change in pressure from the ever dwindling glaciers changed the stress levels in the earths mantle causing an increased time of volcanoes and earth quakes and you have a period of natural catastrophe unlike any that man had ever witnessed.
Communities that survived these events, which had seen their homes swept away and their livelihoods destroyed would have talked about these times for generations to come until they finally passed into the vague storylines that we call folklore.
The Black Sea Flood
There is one area that is of particular interest as it relates to the story of Noah, which is the most famous of these stories in western culture. At the time of the ice meltdown, The Black Sea was a fresh water lake sitting between what is now Turkey and Russia, unconnected to the Mediterranean Sea to its west. The Mediterranean was however slowly rising due to the overall rise of the world's oceans and the land gap between the higher saltwater sea in the west and the relatively low-level fresh water lake to the east was diminishing fast. The Black Sea is known to be an area of ancient settlements; some of the earliest metallurgy, agriculture and wine production seem to have been active in this area. When the Mediterranean did burst through, geological evidence suggests, it did so with such force that it would have devastated thousands of square miles and the gradual rise of the Black Sea water levels have left it twice the depth today as its pre-meltdown depth. The communities dispersing from the area would have left the area with stories of what to them seem like a world flood (their world at least) and these stories would have found their way south to mix with the cultures of the people that would one day be the Babylonians and the Hebrews. The location of Noah's Mount Ararat in the Black sea vicinity and the fact that he is associated with the invention of wine making may also hint at some other connections with the black sea communities.
Further reading
Noah's Flood - William Ryan and Walter Pitman
Before the Flood Ian Wilson
Underworld (Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age) Graham Hancock