This Erratic Planet is a book of vital importance to the future of our species. Drawing on a staggering range of references across disciplines including geology, astronomy, archaeology and palaeontology, Ian Rankin' outlines his radical ideas about the worlds past. Contrary to conventional scientific thinking, the evidence he has examined has convinced him that the history of our planet is not one of gradual change, as proposed by Darwin's theory of evolution, but a story of successive, yet systematic, global catastrophes. These have wiped almost all trace of previous civilisations from the face of the Earth. These catastrophes, known as pole shifts, derive from the unstable nature of the solar system, which is the subject of the book's second part.