What if Noah's ark is actually the planet Earth?

 I will give you a little different answer than most. Noah’s ark was likely a real thing and a real event. In all likelihood, the story has the germ of truth because it appears in several different versions in several different religions during the same period in time.

Before writing, oral history was a real thing. People repeated stories with an accuracy that is baffling to modern people who are reliant on writing. I have seen an Irish father and son who could independently quote the same 30,000-line Celtic saga from memory without significant differences.

But like the old sagas, there was a tendency to embellish stories to make them more interesting and religious people frequently added religious or supernatural explanations to the stories as a means of “explaining” the parts that they did not have the science or knowledge to understand. And mistranslations often obscured words and their original meanings.

So, this is a plausible scenario.

About 7,600 years ago (in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic) the Black Sea was about 400 feet lower than now and had wide fertile plains around it where there was considerable farming and husbandry. Surrounding the fertile plains were steep cliffs similar to the ones I have seen at Sinop and Trabzon. The reason the Black Sea was lower was that there was no connection to the Mediterranean Sea.

Then the Dardanelles and Bosporus was breached by the waters from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea began to fill. Modern scientists have calculated that forty days and nights of flooding would have been plausible given the volume of water involved.

During that period is is likely that some farmer noticed the rising water and did something about it. The something would be to build a coracle — around boat made of bent willows and covered in rushes and/or hides coated with tar for waterproofing. (he term “gopher wood” is a mistranslation of Khofered wood which is wood coated with tar.) Then the farmer would have gathered his immediate family and two of each of his farm animals (some sources say seven of each) into the boat and they would have survived. This is a sketch of what it might have looked like.

The design is based on Babylonian and Sumerian accounts of the flood. The animals would likely have been squabs (doves which were eaten), sheep, goats and cattle and dogs.

Over time the story was embellished, mistranslated, and given religious significant. But it is like one of those movies that say they are based on a true story. The original story may have been true, but the movie is almost entirely fiction.

Many of the ancient stories that have come down to us are based on true events or people. My favorite is Jason and the Golden Fleece. It seems that as late as the 18th Century, Tatars in the Crimea would stake sheep’s fleeces down in mountain streams to catch gold particles in the fibers. When there was enough gold in them they would then burn them and collect the gold. I am certain that at some point someone stole some of the fleeces.

And the site of Troy was discovered using the Iliad, which was not written by Homer, but simply written down by Homer. Another oral narrative that turned out to be true.