Societies and cultures across the world have creation stories—explanations of how the world came to be. These stories often form the basis of a people's culture and beliefs, and they can often reveal how people have tried to understand and make sense of the world around them. Similarly, many early societies also produced flood stories, often passed along as an oral tradition before being written down. Often these flood stories are tied to creation stories, as they feature the deity or deities that first created the world. The similarities between these creation and flood stories can be striking, perhaps alluding to some innate quality or understanding shared by humans. However, historians and anthropologists do not agree on what these ancient stories might mean or how exactly they first came to be.