I sometimes wonder about that. I had to train my summer vacation replacement guy, who was a black guy straight out of Africa, and he was wearing double gloves, a hat and the winter jacket and trousers in +22 C, basically the same sort of setup I tend to wear when it is -10 C. I had on a thin t-shirt and shorts and I was sweating like a pig, since the job involves a lot of running around outdoors. When we were half done with the work rounds, he took his hat off, but he still wasn’t sweating as much in clothes that read “for protection against extreme cold” on them as I did in a COOLMAX t-shirt and shorts.
When we were done, he asked how it is possible to do that work in the Finnish winter. I had no answer for him. How long do you think it’ll take to adjust when your internal thermostat is that far off?
There are a lot of bugs in the tropics. Big bugs. Big, gross bugs.* Blizzards are a small price to pay for cold that kills off a lot of the insect population every year. I think our ancestors were right on target.
*I lived near the equator for about 16 months. I was not bug-phobic when I went there, but I sure as hell was by the time I left. shudder
This. Plus, the tiny microbial bugs too. From the point of view of arthropods, evolution is nothing but the story of that funny way that food sometimes gets really intelligent right before it’s all gone.
I was thinking about this the other day, along the lines of “why do people continue to live in places that get so much snow and ice?”. Not only does it seem like a huge hassle to deal with it, I would not want to live somewhere that gets so cold you can die merely from being outdoors.
Someone mentioned that as many people die from extreme heat, so I looked it up. Not so, about twice as many people die from extreme cold as do from extreme heat in the U.S. :
I’ve always regarded it as a proof of intelligence on the part of our ancestors that they got out of Africa as soon as they could. Apart from the unspeakable heat, there is a lot of sickness in the place — Central Africa, with Central Asia, being the main reservoirs of disease — and back then, not a lot of medical knowledge to counter illness.
I don’t care for being cold; but I’d be dead in a 90F heatwave…
This, and it’s not like anyone had a map with them. After 1200 years nobody’s telling stories about how great great great great x50 grandpa used to live in a slightly better climate, and wouldn’t we all be better off picking up and walking 1000 miles. I imagine it was only recently that anyone had any concept of a world outside a couple days walking distance, other than every once in a while a stranger might show up from “far away.”
Easy. It’s a perfect break in bulk point, located between the raw materials of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the farms of the Midwest and coal fields of West Virginia, and the large markets of the Northeast. It was much cheaper to manufacture finished goods in Buffalo than in NYC. Essentially, Buffalo was the 1800s version of Shenzen and Hyderabad.
shrugs I don’t know what our ancestors were thinking, but I’ve gotten heatstroke way more often than I’ve gotten injured by the cold. It’s easier to prepare for the cold than it is to deal with the heat. You can’t make yourself cooler walking outside in intense heat, but you can bundle up enough to keep warm while walking outside. Hell, if it wasn’t for the snow, I’d take winter happily.
I think the point is that the weather/climate is not the only factor. There’s the availability of food resources, there’s the issue of beneficial trade with other peoples. There’s the issue that the more desirable land in Colorado is already populated by people who aren’t going to let you move in. There’s the fact that the Hopi were already in hiding from a hostile force – their ability to roam freely was somewhat limited.
At the time when humans first started to migrate into Europe and Eurasia, weren’t the plains in the north simply stiff with bison, woolly rhinos, mammoth, aurochs, wild horses, and all manner of tasty red meat? And no other humans were up there to compete for this massive food source. I can see making the tradeoff of warm weather for unlimited food with little competition.
Even a cursory examination of the history of any area will quickly reveal why people stayed there.
You might not like it in winter in Illinois or Ontario, but those places are pretty fantastic for growing crops. Quebec City might be as cold as all hell in February, but it’s fine for growing food in July, it was a great place to make money in the fur trade, and for a lot of people it sure beat a life of nothing in the Old World.
Places where it gets cold but a lot of people live are… not surprisingly, it seems to me… also places where stuff grows. At first, animals were plentiful, and then as agriculture developed, crops were plentiful. Coming up with ways to make warm clothes is easy as compared to the grind of finding new food.
Well, Europe was inhabited by Neatherthals, who were either a variant of our species or a closely related human species. We competed with them and drove them to extinction.
The responses here seem to be all over the map in trying to figure out what the OP means by our ancestors. If by ancestors, the OP meant the migration of people since the 1500s from “the old world” to “the new world”, then figuring out the reasons are pretty easy. There are plenty of written records indicating overcrowding in Europe, which meant increasing incidents of famine, word of mouth getting around that there was this land mass that was (mostly) uninhabited, and the desire for general exploration (i.e. sailors being commissioned by the royal court to get out and claim some more land). I can’t say much about the specific details of these ancestors, since that part of history isn’t what I majored in.
If we’re talking about ancestors that go way back to the Paleolithic ages, all we have are speculation. I suspect it’s the same as what others have brought up about crowding and food availability. Migration happens over many generations, and the ones who crossed the Bering Strait are not the ones who initially migrated out of Africa. And at any rate, Homo sapiens are not the only humanoids who ventured out. We see fossil evidence of Homo erectus in parts of Asia, and they migrated out independently. Meaning, before Homo sapiens were around, Homo erectus migrated out, but for whatever reason died off. When Homo sapiens came out of Africa, it was quite some time later. (Contrary to what Chinese scientists will tell you, Homo sapiens in Asia did not evolve from Homo erectus in Asia. All Homo sapiens alive today can trace their ancestry back to Homo sapiens in Africa.) So, Homo erectus were probably searching for better food sources too.
It’s a good point if you’re talking about recent migration. But back in the day, when our ancestors migrated out of Africa, disease didn’t fester in communities like we see them doing today. They either killed off the ones who didn’t build immunity to the disease, or they got the hell out before it infected them. The diseases we see today (from viruses and bacteria) are the product of agriculture. When agriculture took off, communities no longer needed to run around looking for food, which meant that creating settlements were much easier (giving rise to concepts like city states) and more productive, since you want to hang around your crops and fend intruders off your field. So once everyone was comfortable, when disease hit, you either build immunity or you die, because the concept of having to go to another place is no longer common knowledge.
Someone mentioned Gun, Germs, and Steel, which I highly recommend it. It dives into not just migration patterns, but how Europeans managed accumulate enough technological advances to “conquer” the Americas. It’s not all there is to know about how Spain overtook Central America, but it’s a good starting point.
And with regards to the clothes bit… clothes aren’t just for keeping you warm. Even before humans migrated out of Africa, there were articles of clothing worn. I could delve into the cultural connotations of that, but if you want a strict biological and simple explanation… clothes also provide shade.
Sorry to make this long and GQish, but the TLDR version: for food sources while reducing competition.
As I’ve often said about Connecticut, anyone who stays in a place where it gets as cold as it does in the winter and as hot as it does in the summer must be stupid, stubborn, desperate, or all three.
I don’t think I am a “tropical species” because I am pink, and in the hot sun I turn red and blister. Sure, in the distant past my ancestors were African, but over the millenia they pinkified and now I am stuck living in more temperate/chilly climes.
Forget all this nonsense about food sources and population density, our ancestors were merely more bashful than we are today. It’s easy to look sexy in a peacoat or nice fluffy winter jacket, but strip down to trunks and -BOOM- instant pot belly grossness.
Well yesterday when I was walking to the bus stop and the temperature at the airport was -39, I too wondered what madness inspired someone, anyone to settle here?!