A commonality I would expect would be that people's proximity to the sea shore. Or at least that the origin of the story would have been at the sea shore, before it migrated to wherever we finally found it.
Borrowing from my CompuServe essay 16 years ago (reposted on my web site at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/geology.html), we find that a world-wide flood did occur. However, it was quite different from "creation science's" Flood in that it took thousands of years, it did not cover the entire surface of the earth, it did not lay down all the strata nor bury all the fossils, it did not cause massive geological events, and it did not subside.
During the last great ice age, the Wisconsinan, the sea level was about 200 feet lower than it is now. This means that modern-day ocean bottom shallower than 200 feet was at that time dry land and a number of land bridges, such as the one across the Bering Strait were open. Judging from my atlas, most of the Persian Gulf should have also been dry land, since it is shallower than 200 feet.
The sea level was lower during the ice ages because of the amount of water that would be trapped in the ice caps rather than being in the oceans. Then about 11,000 to 17,000 years ago, the Wisconsinan Ice Age ended, the ice melted, and the sea level rose, flooding the lowlands. According to a historical atlas I have, the seas reached their current level around 5,500 BCE. Since human populations tend to concentrate along the shorelines and in the lowlands, this catastrophic flooding could not have gone unnoticed. Indeed, it would be very surprising NOT to encounter flood stories world-wide, especially ones describing the need for migration to find a new homeland because of the flood.
Another thing to consider is that oral tradition does not normally reach back as far into the past as we may well imagine; the same mistake was made by the 19th century Romanticists. New ideas, new knowledge, and new interpretations get introduced with each generation of story tellers. I recall an article about the three creation myths of the Mandan Indians, all of them entirely different from each other and each one recorded at different times of the tribe's history: the first when they were first encountered and they were nomadic hunter/gatherers, the second when they were trading heavily with white trappers (flood connection -- a great flood drowned the wolves and from their rotting fur came the white man), and the third after they had been forced onto reservations and had been transformed into an agricultural society. I forget whether they had any flood elements (outside of the rotting wolf hair), but since they had come in contact with Christians who told them about the Flood, it would make sense that they could have assimilated that story into their own -- especially considering that they lived close to the middle of nowhere (ie, the geographical center of the North American continent, which is near Rugby, North Dakota (been there; had our picture taken next to the marker)).
Another example is the remote tribe whose mythology included the star, Sirius. Anthropologists recording that myth were astonished when the myth told of Sirius' small companion; the white dwarf accompanying Sirius is not visible to the naked eye and had only been discovered by the West relatively recently. Did this mean that this tribe had access to ancient scientific knowledge that was vaster than our own? Uh, no, because when the same myth was checked from earlier contacts, before the discovery of the white dwarf, they said nothing about any companion. That had apparently been added after a visitor had told them about the West's discovery.
Refer to "The Dogon Controversy", linked to through Wikipedia's article on Sirius at
Sirius - Wikipedia
Edited by dwise1, : Added when this flooding was complete
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