Traditions connected with the pole shift model of the Pleistocene

TL;DR

This paper explores ancient traditions from various cultures that may describe evidence of a rapid pole shift during the Pleistocene, supporting a hypothesis involving astronomical phenomena affecting Earth's geography.

Contribution

It links ancient cultural traditions to scientific hypotheses about a rapid pole shift, providing historical evidence for the phenomenon.

Findings

Traditions mention phenomena consistent with pole shift

Ancient texts describe geographic and environmental changes

Cultural stories may encode observations of past Earth events

Abstract

As is well known, during the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20'000 years ago, the ice was asymmetrically distributed around the present North Pole. It reached the region of New York, while east Siberia remained ice free. Mammoths lived in arctic regions of east Siberia, where now their food cannot grow. Therefore the globe must have been turned in such a way that the North Pole was in Greenland. The required rapid geographic pole shift at the end of the ice ages has been shown to be physically possible, on condition that an astronomical object of planetary size in an extremely eccentric orbit existed. In this postulated situation it was red hot and a disk shaped gas cloud reduced the solar radiation on Earth in a time dependent way. A frequent objection to this hypothesis is that the phenomena should be reported in old traditions. This paper quotes such traditions from passages of Platon, Herodotus, Ovid, papyrus Ipuwer, Gilgamesh, the Bible, American Indians and other civilizations. Far from being exhaustive the examples show that apparently strange traditions can report observed facts. This connection is of mutual benefit for science and humanities.