Mark Megahan
Homo sapiens won the human race against Neanderthals around 40,000 years ago. Thanks to the miracle of sunscreen. That, along with tailored clothing and better caves. One year, the magnetic North Pole wandered far down into Europe, blasting everyone with solar radiation. Lower class hominids didn’t make it.
Tech saves human race
The human race can thank the miracle technology of sunscreen for our continued existence. There’s a real good reason not too many of your co-workers look like Neanderthals.
Nearly all of them died out suddenly, around 40,000 years ago. The University of Michigan pieced together some interesting clues as to what happened.
According to their research, “Homo sapiens may have benefited from sunscreen, tailored clothes and the use of caves during the shifting of the magnetic North Pole.”
Their ugly and ostracized cousins weren’t as lucky and lost the human race. There was a whole lot of “harmful solar radiation” hitting the Earth’s surface.
A team led by researchers at Michigan Engineering and the U-M Department of Anthropology figured out that the wandering North Pole was only a warm up for a bigger event. A sudden flip of magnetic polarity.
While that sort of thing happens fairly often, geologically speaking, that was the first time the human race had to deal with it. It’s happened “around 180 times over Earth’s geological history.” It didn’t actually flip that time but came close.
sun-protective ochre
Right about the time the pole shifted, the human race “started making tailored clothing.” Neanderthal barbarians couldn’t afford a tailor.
Homo sapiens had already been using ochre but when everyone started getting sunburns they began applying the mineral with sun-protective properties with a lot more frequency. No fashionable human would leave the cave without it.
“In the study, we combined all of the regions where the magnetic field would not have been connected, allowing cosmic radiation, or any kind of energetic particles from the sun, to seep all the way in to the ground,” lead author Agnit Mukhopadhyay relates.
It matches with the other evidence left behind by the human race.
“We found that many of those regions actually match pretty closely with early human activity from 41,000 years ago, specifically an increase in the use of caves and an increase in the use of prehistoric sunscreen.” Today’s human race is made up almost exclusively from Homo sapiens DNA.
Starting around 56,000 years ago, “Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted in Europe.” For the most part, everyone got along just fine but they generally preferred to hang around with their own species. Until the pole wandered. “By about 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals were no longer identified as a species in Europe.“
