>On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:
>
>> The steppe-tundra.... i've never seen any explanation at which time or
>> in which place Rays megafauna-tundra should have occured, despite i've asked
>> several times after it.
>
>There is some description of steppe-tundra at one of the
>references you supplied...
>
>This one:
>
>> explanation of the climate zones therein:
>> http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/adams3.html
>
>Note the speculation that this was the climate of 30-40% of
>Eurasia.
>
>> >My idea is that it is precisely the "quest for fat" that lured
>> >humans into cooler and cooler environments.
>>
>> I agree for this.
>> Or expressed differentely:
>> Only fat made the expansion to the north possible.
>
>But why go at all?  Why were humans interested in expanding to
>the north if they could make an easy living eating nuts and
>tubers, and stealing a few eggs?
>
>Todd Moody
>[log in to unmask]

Hmm...perhaps the same reasons that helped western
migrations...cantankerousness, love of innovation, being purged from
current tribes because of Wrong Thinking, etc.  A friend of mine was nearly
expelled from high school for proposing that the world owed so much to
northern Europeans because they evolved to fight off the Pleistocene
megafauna rather than sitting around plucking mangoes off the trees.  If
you go far enough north, there simply are no vegetables you can digest, so
they would have to be motivated to make the trip. There probably were the
temporal equivalent of Hell's Angeles camped within sight of the retreating
glacier's edge.

I believe that it was Timothy Leary who said that California was the result
of 20,000 years of saying, "The hell with this, I'm headed west."

Mike