It is my belief the origin of all the flood stories from around the world, originated with the melting of the ice caps after the ice age.
That's interesting, I've often pondered that idea. Almost all cultures have a flood tale of some sort, but when your geographic horizons are limited by how far you can travel on foot, a fairly local flood in contemporary terms will look to you like the whole world is flooded, and in a sense at least it is, *your* whole world is flooded. I can think of four places where the biblical flood myth might have originated, and the important clue is the biblical claim that the fountains of the great deep opened up. That suggests an overland flood, and looking at a map and knowing some geology offers some tantalizing ideas. The Strait of Gibraltar hasn't always been open, much of what is now the Mediterranean would have been a plain, and when Africa and Europe rotated away from each other and the strait opened, there'd have been a spectacular waterfall and flood. If memory serves, geology places that event back well beyond human origins, but rising sea levels after the Ice Age would certainly would have poured more water into the Mediterranean and flooded all its coastal regions.
Another possibility is the Red Sea and/or the Persian Gulf. They're fairly significant bodies of water now, but the entrances to them, the Bab el-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, are relatively narrow and shallow and would have been dry land at the height of the Ice Age. Rising sea levels would have produced spectacular waterfalls and flooding from there too.
The third is the Black Sea/Sea of Marmara area. Again there are fairly narrow, shallow channels entering them from the Mediterranean, which would have been dry at the height of the Ice Age.
They're all in the right general area to produce huge regional floods that could have been known to the ancient peoples of the area. It may also have been much more localized too, and the most obvious fourth candidate there I think is one of those once in ten thousand years floods we've been hearing about from other places lately, around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. That also places it near the origins of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
That there was a significant flood of some sort in ancient times is almost a certainty, but unless it was really gigantic, normal weathering processes would have erased most of the signs of it by now.
