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?
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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’.
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