Our Cosmic Ancestors by Maurice Chatelain Page B

the Sumerians, the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians use in their calculations enormous periods of time that were all multiples of 360 days or 360 years? Their choice must have had some reason and I can see only two possible explanations. Either the number 360 was given to their ancestors by astronauts or at that time the solar year was exactly 360 days long. The first explanation is very possible, the second one less so - but not totally impossible.
    The laws discovered by Johannes Kepler say that for the solar year to be exactly 360 days, the distance of our planet Earth from the Sun would have to be 1.009684 times shorter than now. That seems to be impossible at first glance, but less so if one remembers the theories of the planet Venus being a planet that wandered into our system at some time in the past and was captured by our Sun. Earth certainly had its part in this capture and was possibly pushed farther out from its original orbit, giving us a longer year.
    So it is possible that our year was exactly 360 days long ago and that the constant of Nineveh represented at that time exactly 6.3 million years of 360 days of 86,400 seconds each. As we will see later, there is another possibility, namely, that of a longer day of 24.35 hours as the result of a stronger pull of the Moon which was at some time much closer to our planet. That could also explain why the constant of Nineveh was calculated in stable seconds instead of days which could vary slowly over the ages.
    When after a while one gets used to the idea that all that takes place in the solar system is regulated by one constant, the mind is ready to start understanding one of the great mysteries of human history, namely, the regular returns of ice ages, that have played a very important part in the existence of the primitive man and in the development of our present civilization.
    We are nearly certain now that the periodic invasions of ice from the polar caps are caused by several overlapping astronomical cycles. Some of these cycles are well known while others are objects of heated debates and therefore of particular interest to me.
    The first of these cycles is the precession of equinoxes, or the rotation of the axis of our planet around the pole of the ecliptic. The duration of this cycle is about 26,000 years. The second cycle is that of the variation of the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Its duration is about 104,000 years. The third cycle is the combination of the first two and causes changes of temperature and humidity on our planet. This third cycle is about 21,000 years. The fourth cycle is that of the variable obliquity of our Earth's rotational axis in relation to the ecliptic and its duration is about 42,000 years. The fifth cycle, a combination of all previous cyclic changes and possibly one or two more unknown factors, is that of the ice ages. This is the cycle that no two scientists explain in the same way. Each geologist has his own theory and refuses all the others.
    I am not a geologist and therefore can say what I think. Let me just state that the glacial periods repeat themselves every 126,000 years or so, with a shorter warm period of about 42,000 years in between the two severest periods of ice, and then a longer and warmer period of about 84,000 years with a slightly colder period in the middle. It would take five such periods or about 630,000 years for the whole chain of events to be repeated.
    The theory is in harmony with the constant of Nineveh. You have possibly noticed already that all the above cycles are approximate multiples of a common factor - a time span of 5,175 years that I call the 'building block' of ice ages. When we divide the constant of 2,268 million days by 1,200, we obtain a construction block of 1,890,000 days or 5,174.648 years. This is very close to 5,175 years and also noticeably close to the Great Cycle of the Mayas that was equal to 5,163 years. So our ice age block is close enough to