What made early humans migrate to extremely cold places such as Russia to Alaska?
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Obviously, they got lost.
“Listen lady, follow us for an hour and we’ll be back in the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain. If you keep going the way you’re going, you and your boyfriend will be in Alaska in 6 months.”
Big herds of big animals which could be taken down using coordinated teamwork. These animals could feed, clothe and provide other valuable resources to a community from one animal alone for a very long time compared to prey animals adapted to warmer latitudes.
Wanderlust.
Imagine this… suddenly there is no internet or phones. What do you *even DO* with your time. Find food? Psh. There’s buffaloes for miles. Anywhere you look. Lets be wild and discover.
I’d like to add to the other comments. Today we have a skewed view: the places where many people live today may not have been those places that were more hospitable to early hunter-gatherer cultures. In those places where there was an abundance of food, people would have to compete about that more with other animals. Think about living in the woods on your own even in the best climates – it might even be easier if you learn how to live from the produce of caribous.
Things became different with agriculture, favouring those places where crops could grow reliably and thus sustaining a much larger population.
Some people just want to be left alone. I saw this when taking a helicopter out to the grand canyon and on the way back we flew over this group of houses that were about 400m apart in the middle of nowhere. Not a tree in sight. Just 12 or so houses in the desert. The pilot just said “some people just prefer to live alone in peace”.
War and famine. If you and yours can survive in the attic, you get all the resources to your selves and don’t have to get pillaged by people that can’t adapt.
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.
Climates change over long periods of time. I think Siberia used to have a much more tropical/hot climate thousands of years ago hence why people were there then. North America was under a massive ice sheet for thousands of years, now it’s massively populated. In the future no one will live where we live now (major cities) as they will be underwater. Places that are unpopulated now could be massive hubs for people in a couple of hundred years.
Humans migrated seasonally but normally it was to the “greener pastures”. So they normally wouldn’t want to normally travel to areas that are colder. But after a few generations your family has grown, your people have learned how to handle the terrain, and now your farm is a bit too large. So you set up a new farm further away to take advantage of the lack of people there trying to take either your land or your food. Sure it might be a bit colder but its also less quarrelsome, so it may be worth it. You move with you family, you sow the lands and the process repeats. The Rus however were unique in the form that they modernized much slower in comparison to the other western nations. What this means is that the liege lord had absolute power and that the peasants weren’t just subjects of the lord but his serfs. Serfs were tied to the land and were not allowed to leave the parcel given to them. If they did, death. So now you have these proto-russians who went north and east hoping to find an easier time and whether they did or not, the lords would say “well now youre there so stay there or I’ll kill you”. If you liked your land, great. If not, you hope you can survive and petition to move somewhere better. If not, then you hope your kids are granted leave, so that they too may go further in the hope of finding somethint better and the lord content that his people continue to expand his domain.
In addition to resource competition, population packing in other regions, and the fact that it was a very slow process rather than a “hey let’s go all the way to Siberia from Africa” kind of deal, tundra and boreal forest environments can be really attractive habitats for hunter-gatherers. There were massive, easy-to-follow herds of Caribou that provided meat and hides, mammoths and other extinct large land mammals, and abundant fish and aquatic mammals to exploit along the coasts or on the ice. Dealing with the cold is a problem, but with fire, skin clothing, seasonal nomadism, and some simple structures it’s not really as tough of a habitat as you might think. Some archaeologists actually believe that dense tropical rainforests may have been much more challenging places to live and may have taken longer for humans to colonize than the high latitudes.
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