Flood myths appear in virtually every culture on Earth. The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Biblical flood narrative by over a thousand years and describes a strikingly similar story: a righteous man, a divine warning, a great boat, the destruction of humanity, a landing on a mountain, and a sacrifice of thanksgiving. Parallel traditions appear in Hindu texts, in the myths of the Ojibwe and Hopi peoples of North America, in ancient Greek accounts of Deucalion, and in dozens of other cultures with no obvious historical contact.
The conventional explanation is that these stories are independent inventions reflecting the universal human experience of local floods. But some researchers argue that the sheer consistency of detail — the catastrophic scale, the survival of a remnant, the explicit association with a prior golden age — points to a shared origin in a real event: most likely the rapid sea-level rise at the end of the last Ice Age, when coastlines were inundated and entire inhabited regions disappeared beneath the waves.
Comparative mythology, pioneered by scholars like Joseph Campbell and more recently Giorgio de Santillana (in his landmark work on astronomical myth), suggests that ancient stories encode real astronomical observations and historical memories in symbolic language. Decoding those stories may reveal more about prehistoric events than the physical archaeological record, which is incomplete and largely inaccessible beneath the ocean.