Eventually gbob will chime in with his explanation that the flood took place 5 million years ago with the flooding of the Mediterranean basin… which is long enough ago to dodge the genetic evidence of there being no genetic bottleneck. This is not to say that there are no difficulties with the scientific evidence and I am certainly not buying it.
Meanwhile my explanation remains the same as well. This was a local flood wiping out the first human civilization, long after the homo sapiens species had spread around the world 100,000-30,000 years ago but before human beings with their memetic heritage from God via Adam and Eve had spread over the earth, which happens after the flood in Genesis 11.
The only genetic bottleneck I see any evidence for is one around 100,000 - 200,000 with a surviving remnant of a few thousand in southern Africa of the most recent ice age which became the modern homo sapiens group which migrated to the rest of the world after that. On the way they apparently absorbed the Neanderthals of Northern Africa and Europe as well as the Denisovans in the east.
No… his theory pushes it back 5.3 million years. And that is the problem I have with it. It renders the all these Biblical events insignificant to the beginning of human civilization. Though if we find evidence of human civilization from millions of years ago, particularly at the bottom of the Mediteranean sea, that would be a different matter.
I also find it difficult to believe that these stories would remain significant enough to be remembered in any way rather than buried by the intervening millions of years which I find it hard to believe did not have significant events. In fact there are events we know happened which should have been remembered as more recent, like the ice age and surviving in southern Africa. It seems far far far more likely that these stories in Genesis if based in historical events are things which happened much more recently 12,000-6,000 years ago.