I can believe that myths about a great flood that occur worldwide are loosely inspired by real history, with areas that were dry land during the last ice age being flooded when the ice receded, with all sorts of non-historical details being added as the stories were passed down orally.

I don't believe there was a single "Noah", though, as the various population groups that were the ancestors to todays "races" had already spread most of the way worldwide long before the last ice age.

ancient populations were concentrated around rivers and coastlines. It wouldn't be a stretch that one massive flood got blown up into a worldwide one over hundreds of years of creative editing.

"Embellish", that's the word that was on the tip of my tongue earlier that I was reaching for but couldn't quite articulate.

There was an actual post-glacial flood that deluged low-lying areas (such as cutting off Britain from continental Europe as well as eliminating the land bridge from Eurasia to North America) and through millennia of oral tradition embellishing the historical fact of the flood, we got myths such as Noah.

given that the story involves rain, I think that points toward the origin being a monsoon that flooded a large low-lying area.

I think the most reasonable explanation is that the flood legend is an ancestral memory harkening back to Arcturus, a planet well known for it's near-total ocean cover and massive tidal surges. Star Seeds living in ancient Mesopotamia must have had psychic flashbacks to those cataclysmic surges, and passed these memories into our human oral tradition.

I'm with Evilhomer on this one.

According to some, Noah took baby dinosaurs, or eggs, onto the ark as commanded by god, but the earth's climate changed so drastically post flood that they ended up going extinct anyway. These are usually the same people who interpret 'behemoth' and 'leviathan' as being dinosaurs that survived into biblical times.

Also, a robot on the ark makes about as much sense as all the animals in the world.