Evidence of human occupation in Scotland 13,000 years ago has caused scientists to speculate the possible motives for choosing to live there – given that most of the country was covered in ice:

During the last ice age, Scotland was likely a desolate place covered by glaciers, but new evidence suggests intrepid settlers braved the elements by establishing a community there as early as 13,000 years ago.

…”So often we hear that conditions in Scotland during the late Paleolithic and early Mesolithic would have prohibited human settlements because the landscape was cold and icy, but now we have to wonder what was actually going on and why people appear to have been living in the area during what is thought to have been a glacial period,” Naomi Woodward, who led the project, told Discovery News.

….The northern European plains location suggests Scotland’s first settlers were reindeer hunters from the Ahrensburgian culture. Reindeer exist in Scotland, but the researchers suspect the hunters also went after more prevalent deer and other large herbivores. If attached to spears, the points could have also been used to stab fish and marine life.

And so it goes on…

It makes little sense for people to have been living in the Scottish ice by choice.

Perhaps scientists haven’t considered that the pole shift of that era relocated the site of the North Pole, and now in a sunnier clime Scotland rapidly defrosted. And after it had defrosted, then humans ventured up there…

Found this online, worthy of future investigation. The proximity of a supernova required to do us harm is reasonably well-known, but apparently a Gamma Ray Burster can be much more distant (thousands of light years) and still fry us:

An Australian astronomer, Ray Norris, notes that a supernova would be likely to depopulate all planets within 50 light years. A Gamma Ray Burster is even more formidable, releasing energy on the order of five magnitudes the order of energy released by a supernova. It can exterminate life over many thousands of light years. Norris calculates that supernovas and GRBs should activate Earth’s “reset” button every 200 million years but as far as Norris can tell this has not happened for about twenty times that period. Perhaps our luck will continue to hold, perhaps not.

Found here:
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc051002.html

At Wikipedia it says:

The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer. Recovery could take at least five years.

(although I don’t believe in it at all, I keep my ears open for any info that might change my mind…)

Just found this:

Futureworld Publishing International is promoting the release of Dr. Jaysen Q. Rand’s new best-selling book, The Return of Planet-X and Its Effects on Mother Earth: A Natural Disaster Survivor’s Manual, his alarming eye-opening tome. Dr. Rand will soon announce he will be joining professional forces with Retired Soviet Air Force Lt. Col. Marina L. Popovitch and the EnergyInformative Division of The Russian Academy Of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. This top-echelon study group will formulate a high-level scientific research effort to either prove or disprove the reality/actuality of the existence of Planet-X (believed to be the Biblical Book of Revelation’s reference to “Wormwood” —Chap. 8, Vrs. 11).

Seeing as he has a (self-published) book to sell, I presume that he’ll prove it is real, but I’ll keep an eye out for the results of the study

They’ll take forever to replicate the tremendous ideas and studies of Denis Montgomery (“Seashore Man and African Eve”), but it’s a start:

The waste from shellfish dinners discarded in a South African cave is said to be the earliest evidence of humans living and thriving by the sea.

The material was found by scientists working in a sandstone opening at Pinnacle Point on the Cape.

Researchers tell the journal Nature the remains were buried in sediments that are 164,000 years old. BBC

And more…

One find­ing was “bladelets,” less than a cen­ti­me­ter wide, that “could be at­tached to the end of a stick to form a point for a spear, or lined up like barbs on a dart,” Mar­e­an said. This shows peo­ple “were al­ready us­ing com­plex com­pound tools. And, we found ev­i­dence that they were us­ing pig­ments, es­pe­cially red ochre, in ways that we be­lieve were sym­bol­ic.” The team re­ported find­ing 57 pieces of this ma­ter­ial, many ap­par­ently ground for use as a col­or­ing agent. World Science