Of all the Biblical stories, this one has the most sci-fi vibes that makes me think that life on Earth might’ve been brought here from another world. That’s assuming we accept the story as having some element of truth and taking a more wild interpretation of the story. It could easily be an exaggerated story about some regular flooding event and people having to migrate a few miles away with their farm animals, but let’s go sci-fi with it.

Assume that the genetic information for living things of one world was collected and transported to another planet to seed this new planet with life (artificial panspermia). If done early enough, maybe it’d account for the fossil record, it wouldn’t have been modern animals, maybe just microorganisms, basically the Engineers from the Aliens movies (this is essentially the backstory from Prometheus).

Somehow early man is made aware of this, but their dumb brains can’t even conceive of what it all means, they haven’t even discovered flight or DNA or anything, or the story itself was purposely dumbed down to be understood. So this story gets passed down orally and over generations morphs into Noah building a big ship and taking two of every animal with him to survive a flood. It definitely seems like an allegory about some disaster-induced migration.