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 a pile of $1,000,000 bills at one end of town and another pile $100,000 at the other end. All the townsfolk have to run to claim their free money. Which way do you run
Imagine two orchards, one orchard is very fertile and provides 10000 apples a year. The other provides only 500.
Which is the easiest to get some from?
With 1000 townsfolk clambering for their share of the 10000 apples, that orchard will be full of people very soon, so the small orchard will be a good choice, sometimes.
Have you ever had a bad neighbor or someone you just cannot stand? Sometimes you take the long way around to avoid them. After a wile it is easier to stay away because you are used to it.
This is the same thing, sometimes it is just easier to put up with inhospitable conditions than deal with the people holding the “better” land. Just learn a few new tricks, and you can move out of the area of conflict.
They tried catching a train to better places, but they didn’t have travel brochures. Or trains.
Since these were less likely to get invaded. Cost of life surpass living in harsh conditions. And if you can learn ways to survive, generation wise your body will also adapt.
Humans shove other humans out of nicer areas.
That said, if you’re willing to farm animals or gather rather than farm, deserts can make for good areas, but the local knowledge required to survive is high. Acquiring that knowledge is dangerous – but once you have it, you have the drop on anyone else trying to move in on your land.
Tropical areas have other limitations which are surprisingly harsh – many indigenous populations have adaptive responses to the high humidity to avoid as many infections (less hair, and so on).
Humans do live in soft areas. We also live in harder areas. We are astonishingly resourceful.
The availability of habitable land was, and is, a reality of life.
People live in harsh environments because more powerful people live in better ones.
That they are supremely accomodated is a testament to our adaptability, not to our preferences.
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.
Very likely, because someone else was already living in the nice spots.
Or, just as likely, some other group drove them from the nice spots.
Human history is full of migrations, invasions, etc.
In short, humans are assholes. We provide for our friends and family. Anyone else can kick rocks. So those that didnt belong were forced to move elsewhere. This is what led for the colonization of less desirable parts of the world. However humans are very adaptable and tenacious, which is why we literally live on ever corner of the planet.
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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