Intercontinental Cry - Reporting on the world's Indigenous Peoples. Practitioner Device Comparison - Energy Medicine. Grandparents were key to prehistoric man's survival | Science | The Observer. Thirty thousand years ago, the human species had a senior moment. Numbers of adults reaching the age of 30 began to rise dramatically. Very soon after, there was a significant increase in artistic expression, food production and the creation of complex tools and weapons. According to anthropologist Professor Rachel Caspari of Central Michigan University, there is a connection. The surge in numbers of elderly humans triggered a cultural explosion that established our species as masters of the planet.
Senior citizens were the secret of our success, she argues in the current issue of Scientific American. "Living to an older age had profound effects on the population sizes, social interactions and genetics of early modern human groups and may explain why they were more successful than other archaic humans, such as the Neanderthals," says Caspari. The idea that elderly humans played an important role in human evolution is part of a new appraisal of their role in the success of Homo sapiens. Timeline: The 1859 Solar Superstorm. The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed. Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid. The authors have reconstructed what happened in 1859, based in part on similar (though less intense) events seen by modern satellites. View Slide Show Timeline. Geneticly modified... The world as you've never seen it before.