Fun history fact:

Ancestral species of humans didn't prefer to chase wild game down, sprinting across the open country, flinging spears all the way. They were more clever than that.

Instead they exploited the terrain, and their victim's natural instinct to flee. For example, they would drive their prey towards a swampy region, where large creatures would flounder, and then wait for the animal to drown. Or they would drive creatures up a hill and over the edge of a cliff, letting gravity deal the fatal blow.

Archeologists have even discovered (in Spain) the remains of a system of levers scattered around the floor of a canyon, used to shift elephant carcasses around for cutting up, some 300,000 years ago.

More Fun Facts:

Much of the northern hemisphere of the world has been covered by glaciers, like the ones I saw in Alaska, multiple times. New York City rests on land that has been covered, more than once, with glacial ice over a mile thick.

And despite this, life has tended towards diversity, even in the frozen north.

The first appearance of Neandertal (it's not spelled NeandertHal!) man, 150,000 years ago, also marks the first appearance of a solid archeological record of man. Their remains were first discovered in the Neander River Valley near Düsseldorf, hence their name. Debate continues even today, over how much they are actually related to our ancestors, including new experiments conducted in 2004 to measure mitochondrial DNA traces in bone remains.