Here, the sun does not visit — it lives. Zero degrees latitude, the line drawn around the fattest part of the world, where the light falls straight down and burns everything into brilliance: the deepest greens, the richest soil, the darkest eyes, the longest memory of the species. This is not the edge of anything. This is the center everything else was measured from.

Melanin is the oldest technology on Earth — armor built from light itself, worn first here because this is where the light was strongest and the stakes were highest. Every human being alive descends from someone who wore it. The rest of the map is a dilution gradient, not an origin story.