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The story of Noah in Genesis 6-8 is clearly meant to be accepted as history, and nine other places in the Bible refer it to as such (1 Chronicles 1:4, Isaiah 54:9, Ezekiel 14:14, Matthew 24:37, Luke 3:36, Luke 17:26, Hebrews 11:7, 1 Peter 3:20, 2 Peter 2:5 .) Two of these are when Christ himself speaks of the Flood as if it were a historical event. Indeed Christ quotes from Genesis more than from any other book except Exodus.
 The oldest complete biblical texts are the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest of which date to about 250 BC. The texts are little changed from those of a thousand years later, so we can have some confidence that they were transmitted down through the generations with great fidelity. On the other hand, there is also strong evidence that, earlier in their history, many biblical texts underwent a process of editing and updating. In some cases it is reasonable to think in terms of multiple authorship rather than of just one author.
Genesis does not give dates for when Noah lived. The genealogy which leads up to him (in chapter 5) and the genealogy which leads away from him (in chapter 11) might, in combination, give us data from which to work out when he lived, since they include the ages of the fathers when they begot the next generation. In order to find out whether they do, we have to determine whether the genealogies are complete. On the authority of Jude, Christ's brother, who wrote one of the New Testament letters, we might accept that the earlier genealogy up to the seventh generation was complete, and we might conclude from this that the remaining three generations were also continuous. But for the later genealogy, stretching from Noah to Abraham, we have no such confirmation.
As a general rule, biblical genealogies are not written with the intention of recording a continuous series of generations. For example, Matthew's opening genealogy records 11 names from Perez to Solomon covering a minimum 690 years between Jacob's family arriving in Egypt (lowest possible date 1661 BC) and Solomon dedicating the Temple (around 970 BC). If Perez was at least 2 when he went with his grandfather to Egypt and Solomon was about 30 at the dedication of the Temple, we have 10 names, from Perez to David, Solomon's father, spanning 658 years.
We can guess that Jesse was about 50 when David was born to him and Boaz may have been 60 when he married Ruth and became a father. David died at age 70 and would have been around 52 years of age when Solomon was born. That would leave 7 patriarchs spanning 496 (658 -50 -60 -52) years, an average of 70 years of age at the date they fathered the next generation. On the basis that this is not a credible figure, the genealogies must be incomplete.
This conclusion is supported by the meaning of the Hebrew word, yalad, in the genealogies. Although it is sometimes translated as 'became the father of', Hebrew scholars are clear that the word simply means 'became the ancestor of'.
This being so, the Noah-Abraham genealogy in Genesis 11 is also likely to be an abbreviated list. The age at which the patriarchs begot the next generation is no more relevant to establishing a chronology for the period than the age at which they died. The fact that different texts give different figures for these ages (contrary to the normal situation, where there is very little disagreement between texts) is perhaps another indication that we should place no reliance on them as chronological information. Noah may well have lived thousands of years earlier than the time arrived at by simple addition.
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