Robert Schoch’s proposal that a major solar outburst, rather than a comet, ended the last ice age and destroyed an early civilisation, developed at length in Forgotten Civilization (2012) and asserted more briefly in appendix nine of Origins of the Sphinx.
Why the appendix matters
Appendix nine spends its central pages dismantling the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the catastrophe that would have handed the authors a ready-made mechanism, and concludes that the evidence points away from an extraterrestrial impact while the actual trigger remains unresolved. A writer in this territory who refuses the convenient catastrophe has earned some room to propose his own.
What the proposal rests on
That other sun-like stars are observed to produce superflares far larger than anything in the instrumental record, which is true and is a live area of stellar astrophysics; that a sufficiently large event would leave effects in ice cores and in the archaeological record; and Schoch’s own reading of certain Gobekli Tepe pillar carvings as depicting plasma discharge configurations. The first is real, the second is a requirement rather than a finding, and the third is an interpretation with no independent support. He asserts it in the appendix with more confidence than those pages carry.
Connections
Robert Schoch · Origins of the Sphinx · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Gobekli Tepe · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Graham Hancock · Robert Bauval · Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis