I don't know of any sources for this specifically, but it certainly seems plausible, especially with the recent discoveries about other ancient stories being true.

Netflix just released Ancient Apocalypse, which talks about things like this as a result of exiting the last ice age. It's interesting, but definitely take it all with a grain of salt. It's got a little bit of Ancient Aliens flavor in it.

It's not a theory; it's just sea level rise.

Mythology is generally defined as stories central to a culture or religion that don't always fit neatly into the historical record. Mythology very often holds clues to actual history (and sometimes it's just straightforwardly the most accurate oral history that could plausibly be retained through the generations), which is my point here: the mythology holds a clue to the existence of a place other disciplines of science have recently rediscovered.

The sun and moon would easily have been 2 of the most interesting and mystical things for hundreds of thousands of years to past human cultures.

> We know there was massive global flooding at the end of the Ice Age.

There was no singular "global" flood at the end of the ice age. There were floods, yes. But these were regional and weren't singlularly cataclysmic events but rather a series of floods that happened over centuries and thousands of years. This doesn't correspond to abrahamic mythology at all. They're much more comparable to the increase in flooding and extreme weather events we're seeing today as a result of climate change. We are experiencing more hurricanes for example which over time adds up to a lot of damage. Now one could imagine hypothetically that such a statistical increase might lead to a culture falling apart as they can not cope with the increase. Which would likely lead to stories being told about it yes. But if ten thousand years from now, that story would be that a single great storm wiped out that civilization (or to make it more akin to the abrahamic tales, wiped out 99.9999% of humanity) in an instant, that would be wildly incorrect.

> Inuit oral history recorded villages (among a people that did not have permanent villages). Those villages have been found underwater.

Color me skeptical at best.

> Australian aboriginals passing down the names, locations of descriptions of islands that don't exist. But we found them underwater by following those stories, and they would have been above water at the end of the Ice Age.

Yes. Again. Color me skeptical at best. I am aware of these claims by some scholars; but this is by no means accepted consensus science. The notion that a society that has no writing or mapmaking could maintain an accurate oral tradition that somehow records exact locations and details of geographical features that were lost 15-10000 years ago is frankly so absurd that I'm inclined to dismiss such claims out of hand. At the very least it's going to require a hell of a lot more evidence than one or two papers when the far more likely explanation is that these kinds of claims are a case of researcher bias where they're essentially pigeonholing the facts into unclear stories, or these islands were in fact dry land much more recently.

> Why would we doubt that the Sumerians, who were 6,000 years closer in time to the Ice Age, would not have remembered the post Ice Age flooding in their oral histories?

Because the ability of humans to accurately re-tell a story is notoriously unreliable even where it concerns very recent events. The idea that we could accurately pass information down this way over a period of many thousands of years is simply not very plausible.

And as I pointed out earlier, it really doesn't take much for a culture to come up with flood stories without having to have some sort of cultural memory of a particularly bad one ten thousand years ago. Floods are common. Islands and other stretches of land disasappearing due to flood erosion are common.

Arguing that they're memories of late ice-age floods is almost like a reverse prophecy fallacy: If I predict that at some undefined point in the future, there will be war, does that mean I'm a prophet, or did I simply make the obvious observation that an event that has happened countless times before is probably going to happen again? Similarly, in reverse, if a culture has some sort of grand destructive flood story in its tradition, do you really think it's more likely that they've accurately kept the memory alive of a flood 10000 years ago as opposed to just mixed and matched observations of more recent floods together, finding seashells on mountains (which isn't caused by floods) and tried to fill in some blanks here and there? People make shit up all the time.

Also because the Sumerian creation myth incorporating the flood is generally believed to have been inspired by a local river flood at Shuruppak (which is where the story begins) around 2900BCE, causing the settlement to be abandoned for a time. The Sumerian flood myth is only written down after that, despite us having older sumerican creation myths that do not mention the flood story.

Plus, Mesopotamia is literally located on a vast riverplain. Floods would've happened there regularly. It isn't hard to imagine they might seem to have inundated most of the world to their limited geographical knowledge.

Again, it's a matter of plausibility.