University of Michigan:

Ancient Homo sapiens may have benefited from sunscreen, tailored clothes and the use of caves during the shifting of the magnetic North Pole over Europe about 41,000 years ago, new University of Michigan research shows.

These technologies could have protected Homo sapiens living in Europe from harmful solar radiation. Neanderthals, on the other hand, appear to have lacked these technologies and disappeared around 40,000 years ago, according to the study, published in Science Advances and led by researchers at Michigan Engineering and the U-M Department of Anthropology.

The team found that the North Pole wandered over Europe when the magnetic field’s poles started to flip positions, a natural process that has happened around 180 times over Earth’s geological history. While the magnetic reversal didn’t complete at the time, the magnetic field weakened to cause aurora to occur over most of the globe, and allowed more harmful UV light to come in from space.

Around the same time, Homo sapiens appear to have started making tailored clothing and using ochre, a mineral that has sun-protective properties when applied to the skin, with greater frequency. These behaviors could have contributed to their spread throughout Europe and Asia at a time when the Neanderthal population was declining.

“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,” said Agnit Mukhopadhyay, lead author and U-M research affiliate in climate and space sciences and engineering.

“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.” [Continue reading…]