According to Indian Medicine people I've spoken to (who are entitled, as any of us are, to an opinion of their own) the flood was a worldwide event...only problem being: Noah's folks were by no means the only survivors. They were probably among the rather few survivors in the localized area where the Middle Eastern Noah legend sprang from, that's all. There were reputedly lots of survivors in a great variety of locations, according to those same medicine people. Some built boats and rafts, some simply got to high ground. In other words, it was a period of world-wide inundation (sustained extraordinary levels of rainfall, sufficient to flood all low-lying areas).

Such flood legends are found in most ancient cultures, but only the Hebrews mention "Noah" and his Ark. Other people mention other survivors entirely, survivors from their tribe or nation.

This has largely escaped western civilization, since they've been mesmerized by one account, the Biblical one, for the last couple of thousand years, and have ignored all the other accounts.

Such a flood may have been caused by a major climatic or atmospheric change, and if so, it could have affected pretty much the entire planet. It could even have been caused by a near passing of some other large heavenly body...Velikovsky was interested in those possibilities.

The trouble with the Bible account is that it takes what was probably a real event and makes a better cultural "story" out of it, that's all. People make up such stories after real events in order to prove a moral point of some kind about those events, because when things go wrong in a big way people always figure, "Well, God must have been mad at US, so that's why it happened, and only the 'good' people were allowed to survive."

Ha! Wouldn't it be lovely if the whole world revolved around us little people and our moral doings? ;-) I don't think it does.