More Fun Facts:

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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.