What made early humans migrate to extremely cold places such as Russia to Alaska?
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Opportunity. It may be cold as shit in Siberia, but because it’s cold as shit, most people don’t want to go there, which means you probably won’t get invaded and anything you can grow or hunt is yours to do, cos there’s no one else hunting the same food. As long as you can survive in an environment, life will find a way to get there, even life that has a concept of “fucking freezing”.
Competition for resources with other humans. No one would have left the African savannah if they didn’t have to.
They probably migrated there when it was warmer and the climate changed around them. The Earth was a very different place when our early ancestors were beginning to explore across the world. Siberia, for instance, appears to have been semi-tropical until a couple thousand years ago.
As far as why people would have moved there after they became the frozen hellscapes they are now, people may have been forced further north looking for food and water, or maybe displaced by war or danger and had no other choice. They may have been looking for cooler summers as nomads, and gotten stuck or just decided to stay, or maybe had some early religious affiliations to it. There are lots of ways to make people move places that aren’t ideal.
There are less venomous animals, large game for hunting, water tends to be easy to find, and often wood for building is plentiful so if you have clothing and the ability to make fire then there are some possible benefits to living in cold north regions.
It’s not like someone was sitting in a tropical island then went ‘welp, time to move to the arctic” people lived at the edge of cold regions, got better and better at dealing with cold and migrated bit by bit. Like no one moved from somewhere it was 80 all day to somewhere the temperature is 5. They moved from a place the temperature was 5 from somewhere it was 6, who had previously lived somewhere it was 7 or something.
Here are possible explanations:
* Parasites. Humans are from Africa, so naturally Africa has the largest number of specific human parasites in the world. Including malaria, African trypanosomiasis and other deadly illnesses.
* Enemies. Nobody wanted to take land from northern people until 19 century.
* Inability to leave. Once they came to areas that have almost no resources, they could not move further or return. This is the least probable reason, because humans somehow managed to move from Asia to America.
Idk about early humans, but most people need a really good reason to move to a hostile environment. Push factors include discrimination of religion, race, tradition, economic, or simply put, the homeland cannot provide for them. These people could also be outlaws of their land. Pull factors might include opportunities and resources. The Wild West was dangerous back then yet offered oil or the California gold rush. Many settlements in Alaska are where they are because of oil, and to this day, oil brings in a lot of money.
ELI5 answer: they didn’t have google maps or the weather channel. All they knew is that they were hungry and would starve if they stayed where they were. They had no idea of the conditions of the direction they were heading. When they got to the new place, some decided to keep going while some decided to make the best of it where they were. Remember, everybody was walking, so it was a tough sell to get people to commit to another stretch of days, weeks, months of rough travel.
In addition to some of the above. During that period in Earth’s history, caribou were an exceptionally abundant and easily exploited resource. There were available from central France all the way across to Eastern Canada. Simply following caribou herds over generations could get human populations from Eurasia to North America with a pretty good lifestyle and plenty of food throughout the intervening centuries.
Also, during the time that humans were doing that migration, the climate was pretty hospitable. Although humans are tropical primates, we operate really well in the 40 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit range. Go visit some of the backpacking and other outdoor living-type subs and you’ll see that early spring and late fall in temperate areas are the preferred activity times as far as temperature goes. In fact climate change is destroying communities in the Arctic regions presently, because it makes it harder for people to live up there when it’s so warm. Food availability in abundance, in addition to ease of transportation are some of the major present changes.
The big game animals of the African Savanna existed along side humans as humans evolved into apex predators, those animals had/have an inborn fear of humans. As human populations migrated north over many generation they encountered animals that had no clue as to how dangerous those skinny little things could be. They were pushovers to human predation. Humans are really good at working smart rather than working hard.
These regions had a pretty mild climate then, there was also a land bridge between the two landmasses which is now under water. Sapians covers the topic nicely.
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