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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It used to take dozens of generations to make those moves. So assume you’re semi-nomadic, you move just fifty miles in your entire lifetime, and you slowly adapt to a climate that’s imperceptibly different. Your descendants each move the same distance. After twenty generations, just five hundred years, your family has moved a thousand miles. Along the way they’ve incorporated new local knowledge and adaptations.
Now factor in what’s called “punctuated equilibrium”: that slow cultural evolution is steady but then disrupted by big changes like famine, war, natural disasters, and competition for resources… these could cause movements of hundreds (or even thousands) of miles and a need for rapid adaptation.
Also keep in mind that the same adaptation occurs for non-nomadic peoples. The Middle East used to be cooler, wetter, and more habitable. The Sahara used to be smaller. Islands in the sea rise and fall. People living there adapt to the tiny changes so so slowly, but over a huge timescale, the changes are large.
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