Recent interdisciplinary studies raise the possibility that the earth experienced a high-energy-density auroral storm towards the end of the Neolithic age, possibly peaking at around 3100 BCE, which human cultures have recorded in the form of petroglyphs, geoglyphs and a class of rituals and myths conveniently described as 'creation myths'.

The spectacular lively shapes caused by the instabilities in the plasma could have been remembered by the ancients as gods, ancestors or dragons, whose mysterious antics in the celestial world constituted the destruction and creation of worlds.

This idea rests on the combination of two independent theories:

An ambitious interdisciplinary research programme combines these data sets – the plasma-physical theory of an intense auroral pillar and the mythological theory of creation, centred on the axis mundi. The scientific possibility that such an auroral pillar was observed at some time during the Holocene implies an attractive explanation for the 'protomyth' derived from the comparative study of mythology and ancient cosmologies. It seems possible that spectacular events transpiring in that 'alien sky' inspired many defining forms of religion, art, and architecture, the remnants of which are still with us today. These forms could have been faithfully recorded on stone in thousands of petroglyphs all over the world, enacted in thousands of rituals celebrated until the present day, and narrated in scores of myths now baffling scholars and laymen alike. During intervening and subsequent centuries, the sky could have remained filled with debris, and only in the 1^st millennium BCE would it have cleared up sufficiently for planetary astronomy to emerge and for modern philosophy to embark on 'sanitising' the traditional mindset.

If this analysis is correct, creation mythology was not concerned with the actual origins of the universe and of the earth, as creationists have traditionally thought, but with a relatively recent transformative episode in the history of the earth and its electromagnetic environment. While some traditional societies interpreted these events as the absolute beginning of the cosmos and others - correctly - opined that such episodes are a cyclical occurrence, the entire subject of creation mythology is simply irrelevant to the heated cosmological debate of Big Bang versus 'steady state' theory.

So, could many of the most influential myths be based on eye-witness accounts of a very intense and sustained aurora, accompanied by meteor showers and the formation of a bright zodiacal light, as allowed by cutting-edge discoveries in plasma science?

To date, an abundance of palaeoclimatological evidence points at environmental disasters that took place at various times during the Holocene, while archaeological evidence suggests that human societies suffered heavily from these. Nevertheless, the occurrence of the auroral storm hypothesised on the basis of comparisons between the morphology of plasma instabilities, petroglyphic data and mythological data has not been confirmed scientifically, so the model remains no more than a possibility. Needless to say, it is inherently difficult to confirm the occurrence of past aurorae forensically, but concomitant effects of the physical cause of such an enhanced aurora, such as an excessive influx of cosmic debris or geological and biological responses to increased cosmic radiation might be traceable.

Yet even if an enhanced aurora of this type were feasible, its physical cause remains to be established. Data culled from the humanities at best inform about what was seen, felt and heard, but are principally unfit to identify astronomical objects or mechanisms. This means that, while the theory as a whole is interdisciplinary in outlook, the 'hard' sciences alone have the last word on what exactly transpired in astronomical terms. Could extreme solar weather have resulted in an increased solar wind of such magnitude as to provoke auroral phenomena on this scale? Was such an auroral storm triggered by the disintegration of a large comet arriving in the solar system, such as the giant Proto-Encke whose history of orbital dynamics has been reconstructed in recent decades by cometologists Victor Clube, William Napier & Mark Bailey? Extreme solar weather, passage through a gigantic molecular cloud, the disintegration of a giant comet in the inner solar system, or a combination of these hypotheses – at the present stage of investigation, the wisest thing to do is surely to keep asking the right questions and remain as open-minded as possible.

schematic representation of the solar wind impinging on the earth's magnetosphere © http://sec.gsfc.nasa.gov