I've always felt that the creation story was just that, a story told by one storyteller to another and eventually it was written down and passed to following generations who may have added to it, may have subtracted from it, until it came to a point in time where it was widely circulated in printed form. I imagine at this point one copy was used as the basis for the first few "definitive" copies of the creation story. From then, it was meticulously copied by hand and eventually it was accepted as the one, true version.

So, back to the question -- no, I think the six days were not six, normal twenty-four hour days. Most likely, this was the oral storytellers' way of trying to comprehend what really happened. They weren't around 16-odd billion years ago, so they had to make something up that made sense to them. If God created the Earth (and Mars and Alpha Centauri A, B, and C, and the Andromeda Galaxy and all those other galaxies way off in the Hubble Deep Field), he probably set everything in motion in the split second the universe was created.

-FP