I read a few articles where some of these civilizations main focus was keeping warm because they were located so far north. So why would they not migrate more south?
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I accidentally deleted my response that I first posted yesterday so I’ll repost what I basically answered. I’ve added a bit more info just because this question relates specifically to my expertise and it’s hard not to nerd out about it.
In short, the premise of the question assumes that living in more temperate regions is inherently easier and that Arctic regions is harder/harsher. I don’t agree with it so let me explain why.
First and foremost, the Palaeo-Inuit (Pre-Dorset, Saqqaq, Independence I, and Dorset) as well as the Inuit (“Thule” is a somewhat outdated term for the pre-contact Inuit groups) are highly specialized to live and thrive in the Arctic. By the time humans arrived in the North American Arctic (probably around or just before 5000 BP), they were already highly specialized to live in Arctic environments. For the Palaeo-Inuit and Inuit, the Arctic is familiar and home. While there were not large sedentary cities in the Arctic that supported millions of people, the peoples of the Arctic thrived in the Arctic for thousands of years up until today (since people still live successfully in the Arctic).
Migrating to more temperate regions would require them to shift/adapt their subsistence strategies, systems of exchange, and ways of life fairly drastically. The subarctic and Boreal forest are potentially just as harsh for Arctic-adapted peoples as the Arctic is for subarctic peoples. So part of it is that migrating south doesn’t really make living easier and why would they when they are successful in their own niche.
If we want to get real nerdy for a second and think about hunter-gatherer storage and surplus strategies, the BIG example of this being stretched to an incredible level in North America is the Pacific coast peoples of what is now BC, Alaska, Washington, and Oregon. These places had fairly large villages with big time evidence of food storage and sedentism. When you really drill down to it, the Arctic is VERY similar to this (especially in Inuit contexts). We can pick apart this statement with counter-examples about how it’s different but the broad stroke strategies used in one area is common in the other (although this manifested itself somewhat differently in terms of scale, culture, and ways of life). This tells us very explicitly that the Arctic, despite its reputation among southerners as being harsh and awful, was actually an environment of great abundance if you are properly equipped/prepared for dealing with it and living there. Although, obviously, at a very different scale than the Pacific coast.
The second issue is that, in many cases, there were people already living in the regions directly south of the Arctic for the vast majority of the time that Palaeo-Inuit and Inuit occupied the Arctic. While it’s not impossible, it’s really uncommon for people of one group to migrate into the territory/region of another (even if the Arctic peoples wanted to do that). In some cases when this does happen, you have groups mix along those borders (uncommon in most Arctic contexts) or have other forms of conflict (which is not uncommon in the case of the Inuit and First Nations groups in Canada and Alaska). This means that, unless some new information comes to light, we can assume that there was little attempt by Arctic people to move into more southerly regions (although clearly they did in a few, specific cases).
The big exception to this basic tenet of staying in the north is in the case of the east coast (i.e. Labrador) where you have ample evidence of Arctic peoples migrating further south. For example, the Pre-Dorset, Dorset, and Inuit all migrated fairly far south with the Dorset having a significant presence in Newfoundland (with some fairly large sedentary villages like Phillip’s Garden). There’s even emerging evidence that the Inuit, at least seasonally, visited northern Newfoundland in the 17th to 19th ish centuries. This is fairly far south and is definitely south of the tree line.
The reason why these Arctic peoples did/could do this is because the northeast coast is basically a specrum of the same environment going from the fairly cold northern regions of Ellesmere Island to the much more temperate, wooded areas of Newfoundland. You largely have similar animals, coastal geographies, and plants throughout this whole region. So the tools/skills/experience needed to live in one area are very transferable to others along the Labrador coast. Likewise, this coast had a much more sporadic history of human occupation which might itself have supported migrations from the Arctic down south. On the flip side, ancestral First Nations groups (e.g. Maritime Archaic and Intermediate and Recent Period groups) migrated fairly far north and there’s good evidence of Maritime Archaic and Pre-Dorset co-occupation of some areas of northern Labrador, such as Ramah Bay.
This is obviously a massive generalization and I could definitely talk for hours about each paragraph but it gives a good general gist as to why Arctic peoples only rarely decided to migrate south and why this might not necessarily provide the benefit that many southern/agricultural people (like most Canadians/Americans/Europeans etc.) might think.
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