  Mammoths lived in Arctic East Siberia. In this region there is not sufficient
sunlight over the year for the growth of the plants on which these animals
feed. Therefore the latitude of this region was lower before the end of the
Pleistocene. As the cause of this geographic pole shift, we postulate a massive
object, which moved in an extremely eccentric orbit and was hot from tidal work
and solar radiation. Evaporation produced a disk-shaped cloud of ions around
the Sun. This cloud partially shielded the solar radiation, producing the cold
and warm periods that characterize the Pleistocene. The shielding depends on
the inclination of Earth's orbit, which has a period of 100'000 years. The
cloud builds up to a density at which inelastic particle collisions induce its
collapse The resulting near-periodic time dependence resembles that of
Dansgaard-Oeschger events. During cold periods fine grained inclusions were
deposited into the ice. The Pleistocene ended when the massive object had a
close encounter with the Earth, which suffered a one per mil stretching
deformation. While the deformation relaxed to an equilibrium shape in one to
several years, the globe turned relative to the rotation axis: The North Pole
moved from Greenland to the Arctic Sea. The massive object was torn to pieces,
which evaporated.
