As of late, I have been pondering Noah’s placement within the chronology of the ANE. For quite a while I accepted the arguments of RTB, which claim the deluge was around 40,000 BC, as it had to of whipped out very human alive. I now see that this is archaeologically unsupportable.
More recently I have been searching for a flood in the last 12,000 years. Several candidates come to mind, like the Shurrupak flood, or the Ryan-Pittman Black Sea flood, but I believe both of them still have too many problems to accept. The Shurrupak flood was not very big at all, and hardly deserves the language used in Genesis 6-9. The Ryan-Pittman flood did not recede as the Genesis narrative records, so I have eliminated that as well. I think the flood is better placed in very early Proto-Sumerian history around the Persian Gulf, but I haven’t had any input on this idea.
If anyone has any suggestions or theories about these matters, bringing them to my attention would be extremely helpful.