It’s definitely due to being stubborn, and I say that as someone with New England roots going back 4-6 generations on one side of the family, and 10 on the other. Winters are to be sucessfully endured, not defeated by. As for summers, I like ours as humid as they are, but I’m in the minority.
Here’s a better question: why do people live in africa today?
Woefully late to yet another party, and my points have been covered earlier, but here goes anyway:
If we look at Final Paleolithic Eurasia and wonder why the hell did these ancestors of most of us here migrate to the northernmost parts of the landmass (up to Northern Scandinavia, Coastal Siberia etc., really as far ‘up’ as possible), it has to be remembered that those guys were children of the Ice Age. Very cold weather was the norm, business as usual. It was no big deal to move to another cold locale, preferably to places that were under continental ice until then, and therefore full of pristine resources. Fast forward several thousand years, and there was no option to turn back south for warmer nights, as those places were already densely populated by territorial peoples. Be that as well, as the northern way of life honed through millennia wouldn’t have worked in the south, anyway.
Up til modern times, cold was an ally in some important ways. Preserving foodstuffs without electricity through the winter is easy up here, as long as predators and rodents are kept away from the stash. Even stuff like wildfowl eggs were traditionally simply kept under rocks, and stayed edible for months. Winter turns impenetrable bogland into highways for skiers and sledders, much more efficient human-powered transport methods than walking with a heavy load. Arctic plants contain appreciably more nutrients than the same plants growing in a warm climate, as vitamin C, for instance, protects plants from freezing.
Is this true of all nutrients? My impression is that moving from Africa to Europe, humans developed lactose tolerance and light pigmentation in order to make up for the lack of calcium-bearing greens in the cooler climate.
For most of human history it was easier to control cold (start a fire) than it was to control heat. Air conditioning that makes Alabama a pleasant place to live is recent. Firepits are one of mankinds earliest inventions.
Granted, if you read stories about living through the Winter on the Great Plains - or living in a castle in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience. Picture an entire family gathered around a fire to keep warm.
That’s where their home is.
I don’t think this is true. If you’re hot, you can take off your clothes and find a puddle of water to sit in. You can create or find shade. You can limit unnecessary activity. Eventually the sun will go down and it’ll get cooler.
If it’s cold out, sure you can make a fire and wrap up in clothes. But it’s harder to make a fire and keep it lit than it is to take off your clothes and sit in the shade. It takes more energy to keep a person alive in cold weather than hot.
I also think of it like this: hot weather is rarely more than a few degrees higher than the average body temperature. On a 99 degree day, all you have to do is take off your clothes and you’ll pretty much be in equilibrium with your environment. In contrast, even on days that are only moderately cool, there is a big difference between your body temperature and the temperature of your environment. If it’s freezing out, you will have to have an external energy source (like fire) to survive, or you will likely die.
I know it’s not as cold, but I’ve been camping in Kenya, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to go nekkid in the temperature it got to at night. It’s nowhere near as hot as you’d think if you’ve not tried it.
Locals brought a blanket to sleep by the fire, wasn’t just me being chilly (5-15 C is typical night time temperature range).
If early people had the same temperature tolerance as we do, they’d have already got pretty good at making it warmer with clothing, furs, fire, huts etc. before anyone ever left the plains- it would just be a matter of making them more efficient. Come to think of it, the fact animal fur tends to get thicker and warmer as the temperature falls would be a big help.
Also less tendency for drought away from the plains. Many things could have helped move people.
Why do people live in Africa?
Because not all of Africa is jungle, malarial-infested wasteland. There are gorgous places there and people have been surviving just fine for thousands and thousands of years. Plus, where are they all going to go? It’s not like there are countries out there offering full citizenship to any African who shows up on its downstep.
I was watching a documentary about a week ago about how people migrated out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. Essentially the geneticist guy who made the film wanted to trace the genetic markers found in the Khosians (considered the only remaining group of modern humans most related to the original group from whom we can all trace our ancestry to.) It was amazing how far the guy traveled on his quest. He left southern Africa (in his t-shirt and Tevas) and wound up all the way in Siberia (or some hellish place like that), where a small group of stocky, Asiatic people live. It was something like -50 degree below zero there, and the guy’s face looked as frozen as a block of ice as he spoke to the camera. The people’s sole food and source of materials were reindeer, and although they lived in probably the most inhospitable place on Earth, their simple little homes were (according to the dude) pretty warm. These people were related to the folks who broke off on their own and crossed the Berring Straight for the Americas.
One thing that was apparent from the video was how much our bodies have adaptd with clinal changes. Allen’s rule explains why folks like the Inuit are stockier–with shorter appendages–compared to people in warmer temperatures. So it’s not like people traveled hundreds of miles over the course of a lifetime, ending up in an environment drastically different than the one they were born into. The migrations were so gradual that our bodies were able to adjust to the environment (through acclimation as well as adaptation).
Another thing that was interesting: the world’s climatic patterns have changed over the course of our existence. Areas that were once lush and abundant with life gradually transformed into deserts (and vice versa) due to Ice Ages, big and small. I imagine that if an Ice Age is creeping up on you in a bad way, that would be a motivator to make tracks somewhere else. You or your more recent descendants settle in the “somewhere else” and then climate changes again. From the heavens, generations later, you see your distant descendants eeking out a living in an environment much harsher than the one you left. But because there are so many humans on the planet now, it’s not so easy for them to just up and leave for greener pastures. Someone else is living there and they have guns!
Still, I agree with the OP. If I had been with the pack of early humans living in the Mediterraean area, I think I would have set down roots and said to the bored and restless wanderers, “I’ll catch up with ya’ll later. I’m fine here.” All the meat has migrated? I’d be a damn vegetarian, living off of dates and figs and things. I can’t stand the cold.
I can’t the stand the extreme heat either, though. I can’t imagine how the Seminoles and Miccosukee Indians survived out there in south Florida, not only with all that heat but also the mosquitos! They must have been some mighty tough people.
We must all come from mighty tough people.
I think its true depending on the area. In the dessert it might be difficult to find shade or water. In the plains it might be hard to find fuel. Which is why even now there are places where people don’t tend to live - the dessert (no water, no shade) and the arctic (not enough fuel for the temperature.
Does that study take into consideration the number of people who live in extremely cold environs vs. those who live in extremely hot ones?
If I am reading it correctly, it says that the risk is calculated based on the magnitude of the population which is potentially affected by the hazard of interest. (In other words, answer to your question would be “yes”). (Note 2. on Page 12).
However, in the table I referred to above, I don’t see any guidance whether it was done that way or not. So I don’t know.
Here’s a population density map for the U.S. I don’t know if we could make the case that colder states have greater population, or not, based on that.
Skiing.
God, I love the cold.
I burn and blister in the sun, and like someone else said, it’s so much easier to stay warm than to cool off. Think about how long it took to develop air conditioning boxes that most people could have in their windows. Before that, the technology for cooling off was fans and shade. Meanwhile fireplaces and stoves keep one toasty warm. And clothes. If I have to be outside on a blisteringly hot summer day, I dress as a lightly as possible and scurry from air conditioned building to air conditioned vehicles, but I’m still slathered in sweat. When it’s equally deathly cold, good clothes keep me warm and my shirts aren’t soaked through when I get where I’m going.
I’m lazy, anybody have access to the same from places where a/c is not considered a standard feature?
Productivity suffers from hot temperatures. I don’t know remember where I heard this, but one hypothesis for the slow progress of the South was that before the advent of air conditioning, it was just too damn hot to function. Once air conditioning became the norm, entrepreneurs from the great white north started migrating southwards and people became more productive.
I imagine before people learned how to sew clothing (skins and furs) very well, it was kind of like the same thing in colder climates. Once people started working with natural fibers and invented textile arts, it wasn’t practical for people to migrate very far northwards.
That paper talked briefly about the same on a global level. There are a bunch of references (two pages) in the document - maybe you could find something there.
Incidentally those people who think the solution to heat is 'taking off your clothes" are either ghosts or have never seen a hot day in their lives.
Once again, heat may be uncomfortable, but is rarely deadly, at least compared to cold.
Obviously I prefer warm weather, and my posting this thread is a reflection of that.