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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I just flew across the western U.S., and was struck once again by how much inhospitable (to us), uninhabitable terrain there is in the world. Most of Australia fits that category, and as with the western U.S., water is the limiting factor.
With migration, it’s easy to forget that it often took humans centuries and generations to get from, say, Central America to the Andes, so the perceived changes in any given move of a few hundred miles were generally slight. It wasn’t as though someone jumped on a plane in Seoul and ended up in Siberia. Once we developed the ability to travel long distances over water, people often did abandon settlements in harsh environments and return from where they came. The Vikings abandoned Greenland, for example.
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