Noah's Ark – what does it mean?

According to a new translated Cuneiform tablet, Noah’s Ark was round. Reading the Daily Mail Comments I read :
Cardiff supporter:

Noah was a farmer who built a larger version of the locally used coracle. An earlier earth quake warned him that the natural dam holding back the Mediterranean would likely breach and flood the lower land [I assume this is the Black Sea Hypothesis]. As the story says a large round boat was built, similar to a round inflatable lifeboat but instead of rubber rings reeds. As Thor Heyerdahl created in his second adventure Ra 2 large reed like ropes bound together. He took 2 of each of his farming stock and his family and survived to make history. What’s the problem?

The problem is that the very fact that this is such a well known story after three and half thousand years, suggests that there is something unique about this story that rings a particular resonance with people. That strongly suggests the story will have been moulded over time to represent what we want to hear rather than any actual historical event.
No doubt there was an original event (or events). That event would have been unique enough to have warranted a story teller to have related it to others. But that original story may have been as simple as a man, building a small boat to save his own family and small herd of sheep & dog. Over time, the story “grew legs”. Either individual story tellers embellished the story, or perhaps stories were combined, but clearly more and more animals were added and the boat and flood became bigger until the whole grew to such gigantic proportions that it was THE popular story.
So rather like an avalanche, the initial story is small, but it grows, and it grows, until it reflects not so much the original story, but the shape of the landscape over which it pours: what the listener wants to hear.
So I think very old and popular stories like this tell us far more about humanity than about any original “event”, because they tell us what we want to hear. So, what is it we want to hear? What is so unique about the story? Is it:

1. That a man builds a boat
2. That there is a flood
3. That the man is saved?
4. That “god” (or whatever it was in the Babylonian version or “science” in the modern version as one might now interpret the “earthquake” to mean) … foretold something.

No! What I think is unique about the Noah story is that humans saved animals – not just their own domesticated animals – but wild ones.
And this is quite unique
Around ten thousand to two thousand BC, a massive transformation affected humanity (known as the Neolithic farming revolution). Because we started incorporating other species into our communities. In a real sense animals became “part of the family”, so that we cared for the young of other species, we nurtured them like our own children … and then we slaughtered them.
So, I do not think this story could not have existed before domestication, because to a Mesolithic hunter, animals were the “them” and humans were the “us”. This story would be utter madness to a Mesolithic hunter – why save prey? Save yourself and then eat the animals that drowned!
Yes humans had a relationship with animals, but that was one of living in the same space, of competing with each other for food and resources, not one of nurturing and caring for each other.
A Mesolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher, had no need to think “caring feeling” at all about other species. If they did, and they hesitated at all before the kill, they and their families would suffer . As such it seems unlikely that any hunter would see other animals as “furry fluffy balls” and go “arghh” when they saw a cute chick. Instead, they would treat them inhuman food and a chick as somewhat easier albeit smaller prey.
However, perhaps there may have been some empathy. A hunter able to understand how a deer would “feel” in a particular situation, might be able to predict how they would behave when e.g. they saw a human. Understanding the bonds between animals, might allow them to predict the behaviour of mother and calf. So empathy may have improved hunting skills. Indeed, such empathy may have been a prerequisite to the Neolithic farming revolution. Because this change was so complex I do not think it could have happened in one sudden change. Empathy was a prerequisite, but even so, this “Mesolithic” empathy is very much more detached than that of nurturing, caring & protecting animals (and then eating them).
Even today, most people could not kill their own pets. Indeed there are numerous pieces of research showing that pets are treated as members of the family. Only special “high priests” (vets) are “allowed” to end the life of animals in a ritual full of symbolism (money). Today, industrial farming has “dehumanised” animals (no pun intended!) and so it is easier for people to kill these pseudo members of the community of mankind.
That is in sharp contrast to society only a few generations ago, when all farmers had very small herds where they would know each animal individually. So, we are unlikely to be that different genetically.
The big difference is not in us, but in our culture, because life was more brutal. For example people could be hanged with little remorse by society; slaves were kept and allowed to die, people would die on the street, and in Roman times it was acceptable practice to expose unwanted babies and leave them to die.
It was easier to be brutal in the past, but we are still basically the same people genetically and their genetics didn’t stop adults caring for children, and as animals which were very much part of the extended family.
So farming is a very difficult thing to incorporate into human emotions, because it involves the juxtaposition of two very contradictory behaviours:

• Nurturing, caring, protecting
• Killing and eating

Only if these contradictory urges can be reconciled, can we both extend care to animals of an entirely different species AND use them for food. Indeed, the danger, is that if genetics or learning or whatever caused this change enables us to kill “pseudo-family” members like animals, then this behaviour could be extended to members of our own family. In other words, if people became “less empathetic” toward the pseudo-family members of domesticated animals, they might also become less empathetic toward their own children and the benefit of increased food, may have been lost by a less caring attitude to our own families.
To put it another way, in the Mesolithic humans had a simple relationship with other species. They were “prey” and we were “humans”. In the Neolithic, that relationship became much more complex, as there were now “prey” (they were still hunters), but now their were “eating-family-members” & “eaten-family-members”. The much more subtle distinction between members of the human “community”, needed a more complex brain and concept of “us and them”.
So, it is fairly certain, that the change was not simple, I suspect there was a (perhaps small but still significant) physical change to the brain to increase social “understanding” to cater for the more complex social relations. So, there must have been perhaps a number of small but incremental changes to both DNA and learned behaviour so as to enable this difficult compromise that is “farming” to become engrained in society.
I think this was THE major transformation in society in the last  100,000 years. A move from humans as separate from other species, to one in which other species came under the care of humanity – as pseudo members of the family – until that bond was broken when they were eaten.
But if this farming revolution required a “higher social intellect”, then it too, may have been the precursor to more complex social organisations leading in turn to larger communities and eventually by extension to modern civilisation.
So, perhaps this is why the story of Noah – saving all the animals is so enduring. Did a change in our DNA, lead to a change in our brain, os that we were able to cope with a more complex relationship to animals. So that we no longer saw them as prey, but instead animals which were part of our family and something we should nurture? And is this the real meaning of this story. Not because there was ever an original story like this, but because this is the type of story that a society of farmers wants to hear?
Noah: the story of humans bringing together animals under human’s care.
… and if animals can become part of our “family” … why not then inanimate objects: houses, cars or even … Gaia?