... believed that the Old Testa-ment provided most of the information they needed to document the en-tire history of the Earth. This was, at the time, not an unreasonable as-sumption as there were ... curve. These variations, how-ever, are too gradual to explain the short-term wiggles. The consensusis that these are related to changes in the sun’s activity.It might seem strange that the sun ... foothold in the eigh-teenth century, when a few brave souls, on the basis of their close obser-vations of nature, began to question the wisdom of the day about the Earth’s age, which was then strongly...