Why did humans decide to settle down in very harsh environments like Siberia or the Saharan Desert, why not live in places more moderate and more accepting to life and civilization?
In: 2272
“hey can I build my farm here?”
No that’s my land. Leave or I’ll kill you.
“Ok how about way over here?”
No that is Jeff’s land. He will kill you.
“Um how about way out here in this awful, uncomfortable, baren wasteland?”
Yeah that’s fine. Only place not already taken.
Today being a millennial…
“Hey can I build a cabin in the barren wasteland?”
No already taken.
There are many houses in Norway with 2-digit numbers of kilometres between it and the next one. Does that answer your question?
Sometimes you just think „f this, f that, f you, f that guy, I‘m going to live in the desert“
Because there are other people at those places already. rather than contend with the other people, they contend with the weather.
Like all of us nowadays, the ancient people also were just born in the place they were born and accepted and adapted to where they lived. Unlike nowadays, they may not even have know that there were warmer area’s on the planet, that – even if they knew – were so far away that it was unreachable. Also which way should they go? Perhaps they gradually (in the course of generations) moved in a certain direction only to find themselves in even harsher climates.
As others have pointed out, Sahara wasn’t always a desert.
As for any other place.
A village of humans would grow until the lands around it couldn’t support the inhabitants. At that point a band of probably the younger generation from the village would break out and settle a day or two away.
Repeat that action a few thousand years and people have moved hundreds of miles through different climates, but each move was very small so no one tribe noticed that they moved from hot to cold.
There has also been several mass migrations where conquering general’s like Alexander or ghengis khan has sent millions of people fleeing for their life and picking any space they felt far enough to be safe. So perhaps the frozen north probably felt safer than the alternative at some point.
Humans settle everywhere they can. As a population stabalizes and begins to grow, it is forced to expand its territory to support its resources needs. Once the immediate surroundings can no longer support the growing population, groups are forced to leave and find other habitable lands.
When given enough time, every settlement will reach a population limit, the max amount of people that can survive on x amount of land given the current technology. Resource rich areas that have harbored large scale civilizations since ancient times have had plenty of time to reach their population limit, resulting in many periods of exploration into the surrounding areas. Because of this, you can expect an extensive spread of settlements in less resource rich lands that surround those rich lands.
There are limiting factors to this spread. For example in the Amazon rain forest, it is difficult to develop food systems that support dense nuclear settlements, and it is similarly difficult to navigate the terrain to explore. Furthermore, there is such a density of resources that one would not have to go far to find a suitable area to support a small hunter gatherer population. In the Amazon, we see a large number of dispersed independent tribal peoples and lots of uninhabited land, despite the resource density of the jungle. Compare this to some deserts which, while harsh, are located with proximity to large population centers, are navigable, and may provide dispersed pastor for animal agriculture cultivation. Even in the extreme examples you chose, you can get an idea of why you might find people living in/around those areas.
Imagine your parents have a nice cabin. You think “wow, that’s nice, I want one too”, so you decide to build one. Since your grandparents and aunties and uncles have already built cabins in the area, you build your cabin a bit to the side of theirs.
Now imagine that your child, grandchild, and all further offspring think cabins are a neat idea. If you do this for hundreds of generations, imagine how far off the last cabin from the first one will be.
Your cabin is so close to your parents that the weather is not really harsher than at their cabin. They knew how to deal in this environment, and you’ve learned it from them. So the shift is super gradual.
Once every few generations a bright one might think up an invention like ‘boots are a neat idea’, and shows them off to their relatives, and so the practice of boots spreads. The colder the place, the neater people think the idea is.
So yeah, it’s never one guy deciding ‘the north pole is a neat place to live, but I guess I need boots for that’.
People moved away from other people because they were tired of being:
Murdered
Raped
Enslaved
Pillaged
Bossed around
In any environment, the best suited take the best spots. the less well suited (or in human cases, the less well-connected or powerful) get pushed further and further from the ideal areas. Since it’s the only alternative to just dying, they adapt new habits that allow them to live well in “fringe” territories, and to exploit resources that wouldnt be available in the prime properties they were pushed out of. As the new adaptations make the formerly marginal areas dersireable, the same things happen, and a new group gets pushed out.
It’s also not uncommon for a “good area” to become over exploited and ruined, and for the inhabitants to range out looking for better areas to graze, fish, farm, etc. In Russia this was done deliberately in the nineteenth century, when the Czars would send the inhabitants of a village out to build new farms and villages in unexploited “wild” territory.
Like in most of nature, it’s far easier to deal with slightly harsher environments than it is to deal with a huge huge population concentration. Eventually a population will spread out and a big enough population will spread out to the more harsh places.
Every environment has its ups and downs, but like in everything, the good ones are always taken. If this spreading out wasn’t an option, fighting for the good spot would be far more common, and the resulting losses make it an unappealing path to take. Moving away to a slightly less ideal area is much safer.
If it’s easy to live there, we are already living there. Competition is an insanely strong determination for the distribution of populations, and I’m not just talking about humans here.
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