Did the Great Flood actually happen? Every society has a legend of a global flood and of one man, or at least a leader of a small band or family unit, that survived it. uniformitarians routinely dismiss these legends as made-up stories, begging the question of why so many disparate societies should make up the same kind of story about a prehistoric event. Among the grounds that they use for that dismissal is that no group of men, of any size, could have built, in ancient times, a massive cargo ship that could have survived the awful hydraulic catastrophe (or to use the literal Greek word, cataclysm) that the Flood was.