[cardiffspaceman]

I've been grinding on an observation about the distribution of people on Earth. It can be reduced to the observation that the city of Ushuaia, AR at 55 degrees south is the most southerly city (FWIW the other two contenders for that title are near Ushuaia), while the city of Copenhagen, DK at 55 degrees north is definitely not the most northerly city. Although there is a great deal of land below the Antarctic Circle, there are only research stations there. There isn't as much land above the Arctic Circle, but civilians live above it.

[resu_nimda]

I think this is more of an observation on the distribution of land masses than people. Ushuaia is as far south as you can go on a non-Antarctic continent. Conversely there is a ton of accessible and (relatively) resource-rich land north of Copenhagen (much of Canada and Russia, all of Scandinavia). Obviously the "great deal of land" below the Antarctic circle is extremely inhospitable and inaccessible to early settlers.

[alexbeloi]

That's really interesting. Do you think it could be related to the effect of map projection biases? Is that a thing dates far enough back to affect settlement decisions?

[cardiffspaceman]

I haven't done the research but if you look at the kinds of groups that are settled above the Arctic Circle and how they got there, vs how a group would have got to Antarctica, it may just boil down to accessibility. Whalers eventually patrolled Antarctica's seas but, if they tried to farm its shores they didn't get very far. The Polynesian settlers of the South Seas are hard to beat for navigation ability, but one imagines that either the seas were not worth crossing, or the lands were not worth populating, to those navigators. On the other hand, Greenland and Iceland have at times supported Europeans and their agriculture.

Antarctica was not well bounded on maps until the Wilkes expedition and others in the 1830's.

[toomanybeersies]

A lot of the subantarctic islands have similar weather to the Faroe Islands in the North Sea.

However, the Polynesians were not cold weather people, and the subantarctic islands are extremely remote.

It was hard enough as it was for the Polynesians to settle New Zealand, I can't imagine them settling any further south.