NEW YORK - Nearly all of today's Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace part of their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.

Tablet III of the Atrahasis Epic contains the flood story. This is the part that was adapted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XI. Tablet III of Atrahasis tells how the god Enki warns the hero Atrahasis ("Extremely Wise") of Shuruppak, speaking through a reed wall (suggestive of an oracle) to dismantle his house (perhaps to provide a construction site) and build a boat to escape the flood planned by the god Enlil to destroy mankind. The boat is to have a roof "like Apsu" (a fresh water marsh next to the temple of Enki), upper and lower decks, and to be sealed with bitumen. Atrahasis boards the boat with his family and animals and seals the door. The storm and flood begin.

Flood myths with many similarities to the Sumerian story appear widely in subsequent Ancient Near Eastern mythologies: including the Atrahasis myth, the Utnapishtim episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the biblical Noah story.
Deities (or a deity) create the animals and human beings, but people anger the god(s), so they decide to wipe out the world with a flood. A divine being warns one pious person of the impending flood and tells him to build a very large boat, and with it he preserves the animals and mankind from extinction. In the end the god(s) reward him for his actions.

The majority of modern Biblical scholars accept the thesis that the Biblical flood story is linked to a cycle of Assyro-Babylonian mythology with which it shares many features. The Mesopotamian flood-myth had a very long currency—the last known retelling dates from the 3rd century BC. A substantial number of the original Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian texts, written in cuneiform, have been recovered by archaeologists, but the task of recovering more tablets continues, as does the translation of extant tablets