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?
In: 661
It’s a matter of specialization.
In nature, there’s a concept called “niche partitioning”. If two species are competing for the same resources (food, living space, etc). There are ultimately 2 outcomes:
1) One of the creatures gets progressively better than the other, outcompeting them to extinction.
2) Both creatures specialise into different areas, allowing them to live without having to compete against eachother as much, if at all.
A similar situation can be seen in cultures.
War between different groups was common in the Americas, even before European settlement, and understandably so.
If you’re a hunter-gatherer society, and your population is growing, you are going to need more land to hunt in, and you hunting there means others can’t. (This is a concept known as scarcity)
Since humans are always the most dangerous predator around, and niceties are only afforded when survival isn’t an issue, other people are always a significant problem.
Cultures like the Inuit survived because they understood this, and decided that they’d learn to follow the food, wherever it may be.
There was a choice: Either fight others to maintain hunting territory, or go somewhere that no one wanted to hunt in. They chose the latter, and went further North. They learned how to survive up there when others didn’t care to try, and they were lucky enough to succeed.
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