The rest of Genesis is understood as history, and there’s no linguistic reason to interpret Gen 1-11 as anything but history. That was the accepted interpretation until people decided to start reinterpreting it through the lens of Darwin, but there was no real reason to do that.
Me, I think the Bible as a whole is much like Jesus' parables - it's a book for teaching and learning about how to relate to God and man (the Greatest commandment and golden rule). And that's why you can have two different creation timelines, because they each represent different truths of the same parable, the same underlying truth: God made everything. HOW He made it is immaterial, we can learn that from the laws of nature he set up; WHY He made it is the point of the Bible.
I think a teaching/learning approach is much more suitable for the Bible than a literal, historical record. It's not a literal "word of God" type thing - that's much more Islamist in its approach to a religious text.