As humans advanced there would of come a point where it was safer and easier to learn to adapt to a harsh environment than try and develop better technology to deal with other humans. The fact is that if you can thrive in a harsh environment you are less likely to have to deal with other humans invading your home because who wants to march through a desert just to conquer a small tribe with limited resources.
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.
Related to the other answers: Humans are believed to have evolved many of their features, including upright walking, in arboreal areas aka places with a lot of trees.
It is not known why humans then expanded to savannahs and more open grasslands (which are somewhat harsher to survive in) though a popular theory is climate change caused the forests to recede.
After that, human expansion is believed to have been rather broad and far reaching. Again, most of the migration seems driven by climate change. But at this point, the evolution of upright walking and the ability to travel very far (thanks to sweat glands and other evolutionary advantages) along with the likelihood of emerging intelligence gave humans the ability to recognize the need to travel, travel, and survive where they traveled to, even though the environment was harsh.
Because other people were there.
There is a limit to how many people you can put into an area – and that limit has grown over time as better building means more dense housing, as well as better farming means more people fed on less land (and human effort). However, regardless of what that limit is, humans tend to find that limit relatively quickly, and then start fighting each other over that area. Some times, it is easier to just go somewhere else than keep fighting for the better place – which eventually drove people into even the most barely hospitable places on Earth.
In addition to what other people have said, it’s worth remembering that people in the past didn’t exactly have cars or the internet.
If you were born into a harsh environment, how would you even know that there’s a much nicer place just 200 miles to the south? And even if you did know about it, how would you get there safely? How would you make sure you were going in the right direction for the entire journey? The journey could easily be more dangerous than just staying in the place you were born, and it would be full of unknowns. Maybe that place kinda sucks, but at least it’s familiar.
If people found themselves in a tough environment, but they figured out a way to survive there… there’s not much reason for them to leave.
Should they have just hooped on their private jet and flown to the Maldives?
There was no form of fast travel, no knowledge of what lay far away, no way to carry a large set of supplies, etc.
Also, people knew how to survive where their ancestors had long established themselves. They knew what plants they could eat, the animals they could hunt and their patterns, the weather, and so on. Moving to a new place meant unknowns and new threats, including other humans.
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