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The last ice age peaked 25,000 years ago. Since then the habitable reasons have continued to change. North Africa was much more livable; we can assume it was more heavily populated, in relative terms, than now. The Bible's diaspora is probably the retelling of a huge migration that occurred out of North Africa and the Middle East, as the climate changed. That could have happened quickly, and caused large shifts of population by boat and land from the Mediterranean to as far as East Asia and the Americas.

People as separated as the Japanese Ainu and Basques may share common Mediterranean roots and have become separated as a result of the post-ice age climate change.

We know that several waves of immigrants reached the Americas pre-Columbus (excuse me, pre-Colon). So, they came because of population pressure, and may have come across both the Atlantic and Pacific.

The web is full of interesting speculation about this. One article talked about possible linguistic relationship between the central Mexican Indian language Nahuatl, still spoken now, and which was spoken by the Aztecs (related to several North American Indian languages, including Hopi, I think). The speculation is that there is a connection between it and ancient Egyptian. The clue to "seeing" this is to regard the "l", that Nahuatl inserts in many places, as something of a conjunctive or article. When those "l"s are removed, the correspondence between Nahuatl and old Egyptian morphemes improves (a lot). Without passing any judgment on the contention, it is very interesting to contemplate, and dovetails nicely with the idea that the North African culture was forced to emigrate.

So, yes, this article is talking about probable events. But the "big" story involves a larger timeframe and more of the world's population.

I think what you are looking for are the ice sheet collapses and subsequent drainage of Lake Agassiz and Lake Ojibway as the Canadian sheet over where Hudson bay is now located broke up and melted. There was a rush of flooding down the Mississippi and out the Hudson Straight. This is estimated to have occured in phases between 8,400 and 8,000 years before present.

I am taking the information from Stephen Oppenheimer's Eden in the East; The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia.

Also of interest are the drastic geological changes which accompanied the massive weight distribution changes accompanying the melt of the ice sheets. It would seem to have direct relevance to this article.

Ping. When did the huge fresh water lakes in North America collapse?

Looks like neither Farmfriend or Rightwhale answered, but someone else may have. If so, I do apologize.

Channeled Scablands Theory
Spokane Outdoors
J. Harlan Bretz... proposed a flood in which the sudden release of a volume of water much larger than that which now flows through the area produced the very large scale erosion. This would require the formation of a dam which would hold back the normal rainfall and snowmelt for many years, and then suddenly break, releasing this water over a period of days of weeks. Such a dam could be made by a glacier. If it blocked a stream valley, water would rise behind it. If it failed, it would do so catastrophically since as it began to break up, blocks of ice would float away, so the dam would fail from the bottom up. This would provide the large volumes of water needed to explain erosional features such as Dry Falls and explain why these features don't conform to the more common characteristics of stream erosion (V-shaped valleys, streams follow valleys). Since the flood(s) appeared to originate in the Spokane area, he termed them the Spokane floods.

I got a good laugh out of this -- "The accepted model in geology was and is Uniformitarianism." But even worse was a letter some years ago to Science News in which the writer (a professor, which is kinda sad) dumped all over the Chicxulub impact (or possibly just the Alvarez model, in case it was longer ago than 1990), claiming that, other than this flood event, no catastrophic events have ever taken place on Earth.