My assumption: like with any territorial animal, to avoid competing with other tribes over resources. And apart from the very very cold places like Greenland, most cold places actually are abundant in food when spring comes, which would be the time tribes would venture further north in cold climates.
As a Finn, I’ve often wondered about the same thing. In the summer the air is filled with mosquitos and in the winter it hurts your face and lungs yet some people were like “yep, we’ll settle here”
Maybe all the people south at the time were assholes with pointy sticks.
Indeed, they’re now called Slavs and Germanics.
The current era of excess is unprecedented in the history of the world. For most of human history, starvation was a serious threat and hungry people would go anywhere where there was food that wasn’t already claimed by someone stronger than them.
(The people in very cold climates would fight to defend their resources too! Ultimately there was no unclaimed land that people could survive in, except shortly after major catastrophes.)
Because they weren’t necessarily always harsh, cold environments. The global temperature has fluctuated significantly in the last 1000 years or so. We had a medieval warming period from about 1000AD through 1200AD, followed a couple hundred years later by a “little ice age”. Technically, our world is still in an ice agethough the last 12,000 years or so have been remarkably stable compared to the longer scale geological timeframes ice ages generally span. Good thing our dependence on fossil fuels has upended our real handy metric for tracking this kind of stuff so we now have basically no clue wtf is going to happen climate wise in the next 10,000-12,000 years. Warhammer 40k is very optimistic about humanity lasting that long.
We basically spread to everywhere that could support us. If there was food, people lived there.
Get away from assholes ?
It’s a good point that competition can drive animals to areas they wouldn’t choose. But it’s also true that pioneering a new niche can lead to animals thriving rather than just surviving.
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I imagine following migratory animals may have something to do with it.
