>>2802215It's a good thought to explore, but I figure the year is pretty well sacred as a concept of human thought. We can see this with all the sites repurposed for burial in Europe, with stonehenge, with Gobekli Tepi. Very precise alignments for vernal equinox specifically. The seasons are life to any non-industrial civilization (industrial ones too, we just forget).
As far as O2 fluctuations go, I find it a head scratcher myself. If we take the story literally then 40 days and nights of rain is a lot of atmospheric O2 to take out of the system. Of course, with the magnetosphere depressed enough for that to happen we'd likely also see atmospheric venting. Goebekli Tepi uses star charts to indicate some kind of calamity about 12.5k years ago.
In picrel we see a collection of similar 'stick man' depictions. It's an unusual form found across the globe - I pulled this from an article about more found in Hawaii. The upper left most depiction is not an ancient drawing, but a drawing of the plasma formation you get when you have both a weakened magnetic field and a monster of a solar flare. The magnetosphere gets compressed so much that there is, functionally, arcing between the magnetosphere and the surface of the Earth. The result is a plasma structure like this stretching into the sky.
If we accept for a moment that there was a concurrent magneto-solar calamity like this, then we also have to consider that the initial impact of the CME would likely strip a lot of atmosphere away (accounting for the reduced atmospheric pressure).
Incidentally we would have a point on the opposite side of the planet that undergoes massive rapid freezing as air rushes away to fill the displaced portion of atmosphere. This would account for the 'flash-frozen mammoth' idea that floats around (and is hotly contested by one guy whose article got copy-pasted to dozens of websites lol).
