Well, the thread's still open, so I'll answer jno. Actually the Bible didn't get there first. Literature from many civilisations carries accounts of the flood, and the earliest came from the Sumerians. I believe that ancient texts, including the bible, record a good deal of factual history, but I don't see why it's 'curious' that science has just caught up with it. It would be rather unwise to assume that everything recorded in the dim and distant past is fact, and in order to attempt to either verify or disprove ancient records, science, quite rightly, investigates them in the light of current knowledge.