Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this).
I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it?
Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.
That is all absolutely plausible. If each generation, for centuries, could point to where their gradparents had lived, now under water, that could really cement a tradition.
I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it?
Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.