Competing with ice and snow can be far less stressful, dangerous, and depressing than competing with other humans and tons of other species.
Because they weren’t necessarily always harsh, cold environments. The global temperature has fluctuated significantly in the last 1000 years or so. We had a medieval warming period from about 1000AD through 1200AD, followed a couple hundred years later by a “little ice age”. Technically, our world is still in an ice agethough the last 12,000 years or so have been remarkably stable compared to the longer scale geological timeframes ice ages generally span. Good thing our dependence on fossil fuels has upended our real handy metric for tracking this kind of stuff so we now have basically no clue wtf is going to happen climate wise in the next 10,000-12,000 years. Warhammer 40k is very optimistic about humanity lasting that long.
Many of the northern settlements were escaping war, pillaging, and plundering.
Also the climate may have been a bit less harsh one thousand years ago
My assumption: like with any territorial animal, to avoid competing with other tribes over resources. And apart from the very very cold places like Greenland, most cold places actually are abundant in food when spring comes, which would be the time tribes would venture further north in cold climates.
Yep.
And it’s not like someone went from Africa to Greenland on a walkabout.
It took generations for that kind of migration, some people decided they went far enough and stopped. But at every stop, the ones who could handle colder would expand North/South where there’s less competition.
They were repeatedly being selected for the people who could handle a slightly colder environment, so by the time the population reached the polar regions, all that was left was people with traits to handle the cold. Any remotely beneficial recessive gene would quickly replace dominant alleles in the population.
People think of evolution as spontaneous mutations, but really it’s just the concentration of recessive genes that have been around basically forever
As a Finn, I’ve often wondered about the same thing. In the summer the air is filled with mosquitos and in the winter it hurts your face and lungs yet some people were like “yep, we’ll settle here”
Maybe all the people south at the time were assholes with pointy sticks.
Indeed, they’re now called Slavs and Germanics.
