Must have been an incredible light show and probably one of the last things you would ever see. So we have correlation that significant solar activity occurred during the end of the last Ice Age. And the recent Ice Ages are supposed to be occurring with regular periodicity.
Well, if the periods of glaciation and ends of glaciation are controlled by changes in solar output, then we only have about 100,000 years until the next big show plus the remaining time of the current interglacial.
So how did humans survive ? How did they know they were getting bombarded with radiation ? Did the bright lights from plasma scare them into caves ?
Enough people observed the phenomenon long enough to draw pictures on south-facing cave walls and stones surfaces with a south view all over the world. I think the article said that the extinction was preferential to larger mammals. Since the proton bombardment was more intense the closer to the arctic, it may have selectively wiped out life in those northern climes. There are also reports that
certain sounds are perceived in connection with auroras (though not necessarily through the ears). I wonder whether, with an aurora that is thousands of times stronger, such a phenomenon would make for perceptions that are so excruciating or creepy ("Inuit folklore says it’s the sound of the spirits of the dead, either playing a game or trying to communicate with the living") that people would tend to flee from such regions. Maybe the most tolerable place to be was one that was equidistant from both poles, lands near the equator.
So both poles got bombarded ?
They now think those cave paintings were made about 10,000 BC when the Ice Age ended ?
Equatorial regions have naturally thinner ozone layers so I would think they would be very difficult places to survive during catastrophic solar bombardments. Think they even stated the magnetosphere collapsed.