[Robb_K]

"Most who do not know the TRUE story have amazing misconceptions."

NO ONE can ever know the TRUE story, because even the earliest written version that will ever be found will be, at least, a word-of-mouth, passed down legend, a few thousand years later than the original real-life event that spawned it (likely the end of the great glacial melt, at the end of The Earth's last Ice Age, which caused the breakthrough of the rising Mediterranean waters into The Black Sea Basin around 5600 BCE. Irving Finkel's theories on the reed ark that Utnapishtim could have used is appropriate for exploring the possibility of what might have been the situation of what spawned the legend carried through the generations by word of mouth down to the Pre-Sumerians at the mouth of The Persian Gulf. But, I rather think that the original event was the experience of a farmer dwelling in a village near the northern shore of The Black Sea (when it was a large freshwater lake) just before The Bosporus breakthrough, who put his family, and one breeding pair of each of his domesticated farm animals (and perhaps one or two breeding pairs of non-dangerous wild animals (deer?)), and whose was forced to migrate to a new place to live, because their land ended up at the bottom of a new ocean sea. His descendants likely eventually ended up in Northern Mesopotamia a few hundred years later, and the legend was carried south to the mouth of Persian Gulf along with other north Mesopotamian culture, after farming had been developed and refined there, and was carried south by migrants there, who mixed with the other elements of the eventual Pre-Sumerians, who had migrated to southern Mesopotamia from southern Iran, Pakistan, and northwestern India. Naturally, the original story was exaggerated greatly over the almost 3,000 years of word-of-mouth storytelling, before it was first written down many hundreds of miles away from the location of its occurrence, in a land of vastly different climate and physical features, with different indigenous animal life.

Link to the book: Story of Noah's Ark