I rather favor the Gilgamesh connection, which may or may not be founded on the flooding of the Black Sea.
It will be profoundly informative when good archaeology can be done on the Black Sea bottom, but the cold, depth, and inky water strains current abilities.
Anyway, as the Mediterranean waters flooded in to the former location of a land-locked lake, people who had settled around the shores of that lake were forced to migrate to higher ground. It's possible that a large vessel which had already been started was used to transport settlers and their livestock on an impromptu voyage.
Consider: the ark had no means of locomotion, not even sails. It was only designed to ride out a flood, and settle down again when the slow inundation had come to an end; Exactly the conditions of the Black Sea flooding of about seven thousand years ago.
Yes, I saw the Discover special on the rapid flooding of the black sea, it’s been well documented. The bottom water wasn’t quite as inky as you may think, it looked pretty clear to me. That bottom water is also nearly devoid of oxygen and so ships/artifacts are better preserved than in other oceans(like the rusticles on the titanic). Lake Van in eastern turkey has been pinpointed as the origin area of almost all languages(by russian linguists)and so it would seem normal that the floor of the black sea was settled before the channel opened up to the mediterranean, thus the origin of a FLOOD story.
As you may know there are plates meeting between arabia and asia. There is a “zipper” effect wherein stress is released point to point along the shear zone. The “zipper” has been moving steadily toward istanbul, it’s due for a major quake right off the coast any moment now. This same “zipper” effect was probably responsible for the channel being opened 7000 years ago, as was the walls of jerico tumbling down, it sits on a “zipper” fault line too.
There never was a noah’s ark as big as the Queen Mary, it was a RAFT that rode out a hurricane; bed time stories for pakistani children.
Another myth : the unicorn. The early greeks were great explorers. One went to africa and saw a rhinoceros, a horse with a single horn on its head. On the 10th tellng/fantasizing it became the UNICORN.
Another myth : the vampire. Person in the last stages of rabies, fear of light and water. Funny how people see and yet do not PERCEIVE, why is that?