In geological terms it happened overnight. How would man have preceived the event?
If you are really interested and want your view of the world changed forever, read the below linked book by Professor Stephen Oppenheimer.
Eden In The East"The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia"
Stephen Oppenheimer
"The biblical flood really did occur - at the end of the last Ice Age. The Flood drowned for ever the huge continetal shelf of Southeast Asia, and caused a population dispersal which fertilized the Neolithic cultures of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, thus creating the first civilizations. The Polynesians did not come from China but from the islands of Southeast Asia. The domestication of rice was not in China but in the Malay Peninsula, 9,000 years ago."
. "In this ground breaking new book Stephen Oppenheimer reveals how evidence from oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, genetics and folklore overwhelmingly suggests that the lost 'Eden' - the cradle of civilization - was not in the Middle East, as is usually supposed, but in the drowned continent of Southeast Asia."
The drowned continent reffered to by Oppenheimer was in the present day area of Indonesia and was twice the size of present day India. This area would have been an excellent place to spend the Ice Age and humans would have thrived...until everything went underwater. Some have even suggested that this could have been Atlantis. Dr. Robert Schoch thinks the custom of pyramid building originated here and was taken all over the world by these refugees.
"In geological terms it happened overnight. How would man have preceived the event?"
We know the answer to this, if we choose to look at it.
Among the Indians of Algonquian stock, which is to say the woodland peoples that reach from pre-settlement Virginia through New England and Quebec into the Great Lakes, there is a common legendarium. It did not come over on the boats with the English and French, but was there when the European settlers came. And where-ever the Europeans made contact with the different, warring tribes of this great Indian family, they encountered (if they cared to listen) the same story.
Anyone who cares to listen to the story or read it can hear it still today, from Pequot and Naragannsett on the coast to Chippewa and Ottawa and Potawotomi far, far inland.
Tribal memories of all of the tribes are of living at the seaside, and of great and terrible floods. Geologically, it is likely that there were barrier reefs, for example at the mouth of Long Island Sound which was originally probably a lake in a low valley, separated from the sea. As ocean levels rose over time, the pressures on the shorelines and reefs increased. Now, if the ocean were as still as water in a sink slowly rising, it could take eons. But oceans are stirred by hurricanes, and when hurricanes tear at coasts, sand bars and reefs give way, and water can rush in through the broken natural dams suddenly and do great devastation, and never recede.
When the tsunami struck Asia, the Andaman Islanders all survived. Why? Because a legend of antiquity out of mind, passed orally from generations, was that when the ocean went out, all must head to higher ground. And when the ocean surged away after the Sumatran Earthquakes, true to their legends and taboos, the Andaman Islanders all left their villages and headed into the hills. And when the great surge came, they were all safe on high ground, and they all survived, while an hundred thousand moderns died all along the coasts.
The religious traditions and tribal histories of the Algonquian peoples REMEMBER when the coastline was farther out. They REMEMBER when a flood came and they fled inland. The Chippewa have been in Michigan since the time of the pyramids, and yet they remember, if you ask them (or rather, if you read the records that were left by the French in first contact with them), they remember living by the sea, and they remember the departure from floods, they remember that Gitchee Manitou told them that they would know they had found their new home in the place where the rice grew, and when they reached the great lakes, of course, in the lowlands and bogs there is wild rice growing free everywhere. And they saw the rice and they settled there forever. And are still there.
The Pequots and Naragannsetts REMEMBER when the wall broke and the Long Island sound flooded.
We don't have to speculate how man perceived this. We have 50 tribes independently telling us their own variant of the story.
Our problem is that we forget about hurricanes and massive underwater earthquakes and sand bars giving way and rapid changes that happen, and because we discount our the Jewish flood history (because we desire to extricate ourselves from the influences of Jewish and Christian religion, perhaps), we then discount - no, indeed, we completely IGNORE, fifty tribes who tell the same story of the flood that came at the end of the last ice age, which cause them to disperse all across the newly-opened lands of the woodland (why didn't they go before? Because for thousands of years it had been covered in ice. Even today we don't send expeditions to the interior of Greenland every year to see if, perhaps, somewhere a valley has been exposed and flowers are blooming. We assume that things are as they have been.
The legendarium of the Indians tell of the flood and the migrations that it caused. If we read them, and see how they all remembered the same thing, from different perspectives up and down the coast and inland, we know that it happened and what it was like.
Eden is underwater.
Tibikak ishkwata.