Imagine that you are dropped in the jungle somewhere without a watch, smartphone, or a calendar, and you have nothing from our current civilization at your disposal. You are not dropped there for only a few days, you are in it for a very long time. Let’s assume, for the sake of simplicity, that finding food and water goes well. But you soon have to start agricultural projects to ensure a sustainable food supply.

The problem is acute if you have totally forgotten what time of the year it is and in what part of the world you are.

How are you going to determine where you are? Would you know to find North and South? Which season is it now? How are you going to count the seasons? How do you know when to sow and when to harvest?

Imagine you are one of the early Homo sapiens, some 400,000 years ago. You are gifted with a good brain, capable of solving complex questions and to logical reasoning. Some people lack this ability, but most people are quite capable to reason properly, that is to say if we are not in a panic mode.

Does the Sun Really Rise in the East?

Most people know that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. What many people don’t know is that the sun only rises in the East at two specific days of the year, on March 21 and September 21. This is called the Equinox. The same principle holds true for sunset. 

On all other days, the sun is rising or setting at specific returning locations close to East. The most extreme sunrises or sunsets are called the Solstices. On June 21, the sun rises at its most northerly position in the East, called the Summer Solstice, and on December 21, the sun rises at the most southerly position in the East, called the Winter Solstice.

For the people in Australia and South-Africa, things are exactly the other way around.

To demonstrate this more easily, we have created the animation below. The sun rises globally in the East and sets globally in the West. True South is always in the middle of the two if you are dropped in the northern hemisphere. However, there are possible situations where this is incorrect, and you might walk 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

The likelihood that you are in the northern hemisphere is twice as high because there is twice as much land mass there. But you could find yourself on the southern hemisphere without you being aware of it, depending on the time of the year and your latitude. You would need more time to gather information about solar movements.

Ancient civilizations were obsessed with measuring solar positions to determine the seasons.

How the Sun Moves on the Northern Hemisphere

How the Solstices Change With Latitude

People living in mild climates undergo summer and winter with not so many extremes. Of course, hot summers and cold winters can occur, and the days are short in winter and long in summer. But for the rest, not much else is noted.

For the people living within the arctic circle, like Iceland for example, things are much different. In summer it stays light 24/7 and in winter it barely gets light. Close to the poles, the differences between summer and winter become very extreme.

On the other hand, places near the equator experience little seasonal variation. When you live in Nairobi (Kenya) or in Singapore, summers, and winters go by almost unnoticed.

The difference between the summer and winter solstice increases with latitude. In that respect, the distance between summer and winter solstice is a measure for the climatic differences between summer and winter.

The Solstices and the Equinoxes on the Northern Hemisphere

What Has This to do With Our Method?

The solstices play a key role in our method. If it is true that the geographic pole has changed over the last 440,000 years, causing a phenomenon that geologists have named “ice ages”, then the latitudes have changed, and so did the solstices. The ancient sites that can be associated with another geographic pole were situated at another latitude. This is one of the most crucial points to grasp.

Ancient civilizations seemingly had no watches, iPhones, and calendars, and would have to be very dependent on solstice positions to keep track of the right season. Just counting the days (365) will gradually shift the seasons. Each year the seasons will shift more and more, hence the calendar becomes more incorrect. Almost anything goes awry, from seeding to harvesting, from festivities to birthdays, from the first snowfall to the first storms coming up. After 100 years, the season would have been wrong by one full month. The accuracy with which a civilization could track the correct seasons meant success or failure of the culture in the long run.

A shifting pole means basically two things:

• North was in another direction,
• the solstices have changed due to a change in latitude.

We have successfully explained ancient sites like Chichen Itza, Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Nuraghes, and Conimbriga by using the main research keys, namely orientation, and the corresponding solstices. In all situations, the configuration matched, indicating a high rate of success, and a high resulting probability that our theory is correct. In fact, our method is solely based on facts and not on unreliable stories, unverified ideas, and falsified historical records.

The Used Formula

The formula that we have developed to calculate the solstice angle is: 

• β = 2 × arcsin(sin(tilt*) ÷ cos (latitude)) 

Note: Locations at high latitude become extremely sensitive to small changes in latitude. 

*The current tilt of the Earth is 23.44°, but this value varied between 22.0 and 24.5° over the course of history.

What Happens When the Crust Deforms and causes Pole Shifts?

As far as we have discovered, the civilizations that once spanned the entire planet experienced a period of immense turmoil at least four times in the past. This always happened after a very long period of stability of between 15,000 to 30,000 years.

The periods of instability are in most cases significantly longer than those of stability. During the periods of instability, the crust massively deforms, which means that the latitude where people lived slowly changed. The rate of this shift depended on the location on the planet and the period in which it took place.

A good average of crust deformation is around 14 meters per year. This is immense if we compare it to the current stability of the pole and the earth’s crust. Such a rate of shift does not look like much but it is accompanied by unceasing and very heavy earthquakes, tsunamis, and large volcano eruptions. We have found evidence that during such periods the crust deforms and the geographic North pole migrates.

After many millennia of turmoil, when the crust finally stabilizes, the ancient structures that were once accurately cardinally built would now all be oriented in different directions and would no longer be on their original latitude, which has consequences for their (new) solstice angles.

Nothing seems to match when scientists research such ancient sites and they are completely clueless regarding the sites’ original purpose. With our method, we have developed a way to reconstruct the original site locations on an ancient globe and we have found the original purpose of these ancient sites. 

An Example: Stonehenge

We took Stonehenge as an example because it is one of the most enigmatic megaliths on Earth. With our method, we have solved the mystery of Stonehenge in a simple, elegant, and effective way. The probability that the stone configuration of Stonehenge “just” matches coincidentally with our theory of multiple poles and thus changing orientation and changing solstices, is 1 to 6.7 million. With our method, everything fits perfectly together like a Rubik’s puzzle.

The builders of Stonehenge built an eerily precise instrument to determine when a year had passed by measuring the solstice with an accuracy of a single day. By doing so, they discovered that a year did not comprise of just 365 days, but that there was more to it.

• The Purpose of Stonehenge

What Happens When we Only Count the Days Without Corrections?

Every four years, we have a leap year on February 29^th but only when the year is dividable by 4. A leap year counts 366 days instead of the usual 365 days. For example, 2016, which can be divided by four, was a leap year. In 2020 we will again have a leap year.

Why do we need a leap year? Because the Earth orbits the Sun in 365.242 days. This 0.242 day x 4 is almost one extra day, hence we have a leap year every four years. The small anomaly between 0.242 and 0.25 requires to skip a leap year every 100 years unless the leap year (for example the year 2000) is divisible by 400.

But what would happen when we continue counting only 365 days for every year without any corrections? After 100 years the seasons would be off by almost one month. After 750 years the seasons would have swapped. According to such an erroneous counting system, it would have been summer, while in fact, it would be winter. 

How to prevent this in ancient time? By measuring the Solstices.

In fact, if we could measure only the solstices very accurately, we would not even have to count the days. The ultimate position of the sun would determine when a year is finished and starts anew. This is what our ancient ancestors did and the reason why measuring solstices was of the utmost importance for them.

We have learned at school that our history is very young, just a few thousand years, while in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient highly advanced civilizations thrived for many thousands of years on this planet. Advanced megalithic structures were built to determine the seasons and they lasted not just for a few centuries. In fact, these structures were used over many millennia.  

© 2015 – by Mario Buildreps et al.

https://mariobuildreps.com

Proofreading and editing: J.B.

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