Yes, Noah's Flood may have happened, but not over the whole earth

The Bible (Genesis 6–9) describes a worldwide flood (the Noachian Flood) covering even the highest mountains of the earth and the construction of a huge boat (a rectangular box-like craft) that transported animals, at least two of a kind of all land animals on the earth.The Qur’an (Suras 11 and 71) has almost a duplicate story with a similar huge boat that transported animals and a worldwide flood. In addition two older stories exist in ancient Babylonian epics that describe a huge flood. One is the Epic of Gilgamesh, describing a flood on the Euphrates River (Academy of Ancient Texts nd).The other is the Epic of Atrahasis, which has a huge flood on the Tigris River. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is warned that a god plans to destroy all humanity and is told to build a ship to save himself, his family, friends, and cattle.In the Epic of Atrahasis, a tribal chief survived with his family by floating in a boat down to the Persian Gulf. After the flood subsided, the chief got out on dry land and erected an altar and sacrificed to a water god so that such a flood would not happen again (Anonymous nd-a). Noah also built an altar when he got off the Ark and offered sacrifices (Genesis 8:20). Because these stories all describe an ancient huge flood in Mesopotamia, it is extremely likely that a huge flood could have occurred.However, the next question is:“Did the Noachian Flood cover the whole earth?” This item contains the publisher's version of record, and the authors post-print.