Well, I'm no believer in evolution; I'm a catastrophist. I think there was a horrible global disaster millennia ago that gave rise to the Flood accounts. (Virtually every culture on the planet, both past and present, have some version of the Flood story, by the way.)
I think that Earth experienced either a collision or a near-miss with some astral body: a comet, a meteor, a chunk of an exploded star,
something. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to nearly wipe out just about everything on the planet, and to cause geological structures that we see to this very day, even though the cause of those structures has been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.
When this astral body went past (or collided) with Earth, it wrenched the planet around with such force that it's previous 90° axial tilt was knocked over to the current 23.44° that it is now. It's not hard to imagine that a blow of such force would certainly dislodge massive amounts of water, as the oceans sloshed out of their basins, flowed across continents, and emptied back into basins on the other side. And, naturally, it stands to reason that such water displacement would leave behind a lot of residue in places where you'd least expect to find it, such as marine sediment found at the top of Mt. Everest----or whale skeletons in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Several American Indian tribes have ancestral histories that tell of a "star that fell from the sky" and caused horrible disaster on Earth; the few survivors that escaped, did so by fleeing into deep caves. When the rumbling stopped, it took them many days to dig back out, and when they did, they found themselves on the side of a mountain surrounded by water. They managed to survive by eating animals that had been sealed up in the cave with them, and when the water gradually subsided, it left salt deposits over everything for a long time. It was touch and go after this Flood(?) disaster, because at first, they couldn't grow anything due to the salt.
Another tidbit for your consideration is the fact that throughout the course of recorded human history, comets have always been symbols of dread and doom: if you see one, you can be sure it portends catastrophe. I believe the reason why is that our distant ancestors saw what was coming for weeks before the astral body we're talking about finally made contact with our planet; and as a result, we all have a deeply-ingrained global race memory of that awful event. It certainly explains why most people before the 20th century viewed comets and meteors with a combination of atavistic dread and fear.
You are, of course, under no compulsion whatsoever to agree with me on all this; but for me, it neatly explains not only the Flood accounts, but a whole lot of other things as well.
