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Originally Posted by SameOldStory
But I still have to wonder, Why?
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In a counterpoint-- why not? Back then, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. There were no fixed, permanent dwellings. You went where the food went. And that can mean following migrating herds. Not even necessarily of something as dramatic as mammoths-- caribou or reindeer will do nicely, and can migrate thousands of miles per year. Even moving from known seasonal breeding grounds for one type of animal to another will do-- go where the bird eggs are in their season, where the seal pups (to take your example) are in another. And we are talking long stretches of time (from a human scale, not a geological one.) It doesn't have to be a group migrating a thousand miles in 10 years-- surely people lived on the "bridge" as much as they lived on either side. Groups "diffusing" outward at a rate of 1 mile every 10 years thanks to population pressures would get human populations 1,000 miles in 10,000 years-- and there was easily much more time than 10,000 years to work with. How many hunter-gathers per square mile can an arctic environment (in the present or the past) support? Not many, I would think. Even a tiny rate of population growth would put pressure on people to move outwards.
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That's pretty much my point. Even living in a hostile environment that you know can seem better than moving into an area that may (or may not, of course) be worse.
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As I mentioned above, it doesn't have to be moving to a hostile environment that you don't know-- it can be your children move a couple of miles from you-- and their children a couple of miles from them, etc, compounded over hundreds of generations. Not gonna be much difference in environment over short distances.