There's some things I want to talk about from a biblical history perspective that might get a little rough and delve more into theory rather than things that can be proven down to a science. But before I do that, I want to talk about the art of storytelling.
A lot of things can boil down to teaching and learning and our methods in these regards have changed throughout time. We can easily say that science boils down to learning and so does religion. So "in the beginning"... we think is a literal historical truth. Why? Because that's how it's written; with certainty. We don't think of it as a story. As I've probably said here before, science and religion used to be the same thing but as one specialized more and the other gradually became more of an authority, they started to split off into different paths.
Looking at the bible from the viewpoint of a critical historian we're left with being asked to believe that all oral history from everywhere passed through Noah and anything Noah didn't tell his sons would be impossible to pass on as human knowledge because everything else was destroyed. Therefore, if Noah didn't know about people in China then whether they existed or not could not have been part of the biblical narrative. And the ark was full of animals, not books.
But wait... this question over what Noah could have passed on is even more complicated by the fact that the Noah story itself is a retelling of an older story called the Epic of Gilgamesh. So it's possible the story wasn't even real; simply popular. And the Epic of Gilgamesh could have been about a terrible local flood. After all, they didn't have the technological means to know how much of the planet was flooded.
It seems like a number of historical figures had the same idea to merge different religions so that the peoples of different cultures or religious traditions could all be ruled by them. Ptolemy I did this (which we will get more into later) and so did Constantine. Ahkenaten tried to do it and failed. So what if Moses was doing the same thing? What if he was merging different religious traditions and made up a backstory to tell to give it legitimacy; a story that so happens to create a bloodline Adam to his people. How convenient. It is this connection which even today has a huge effect on people trying to obtain an identity that connects them to God and a "chosen people".
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