snares all of Germany and the United Kingdom, and indeed much of Europe, including the cities of Paris, Brussels, and Budapest. Looking still farther east, it swallows Russia, most of Mongolia, and a good chunk of northeast China, including the city of Harbin.
To the north, we find that even the harshest Arctic hinterlands have long been occupied (albeit thinly). The first people to see the Arctic Ocean were probably Mongolic, reaching the northern coast of what is now Russia by thirty to forty thousand years ago, if not sooner.391 By at least fourteen thousand years ago, their descendants had crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska. From there, groups spread south and east across North America, some reaching eastern Canada and Greenland by about forty-five hundred years ago. A later wave of Mongolic invaders again swept across Arctic Canada to Greenland, supplanting the first. The ancestors of today’s Aleut, Yupik, Inuit, Chipewyan, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Slavey, Cree, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Dolgan, Evenk, Yakut, Chukchi, Tlingit, and many others migrated and grew. Our circumpolar colonization was nearly complete.
Northern Europe got a later start because it was buried under an ice sheet. But after the glaciers retreated it was invaded and reinvaded many times, beginning about twelve thousand years ago. From genetic studies it appears that its most ancient occupants today are the Sami and Karelians of northern Scandinavia and northwestern Russia.392 A second clue comes from linguistics: Today’s Sami and Karelians (and Finns and Estonians) speak derivatives of Finno-Ugric, predating the arrival of Germanic (Swedish and Norwegian), Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian), and Slavic (Russian) Indo-European languages in the region. This is why Swedes, Norwegians, and Icelanders today can sort of understand each other whereas Sami and Finnish sound like pure gibberish to them and also to Russians. The last bits of undiscovered land—Iceland and the Faroe Islands—weren’t colonized until the Vikings found them in the ninth century A.D.
Next came more waves of expansion and rediscovery. French and British trappers and traders arrived in the New World; Russian Cossacks surged east through Siberia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost three million Scandinavians emigrated to the American Midwest and rural Canada. Today, there are Nigerians moving to Fort McMurray, Iraqis to Stockholm, Filipinos to Yellowknife, and Azerbaijanis to Noril’sk. There are growing cities, guest-worker programs, and multinational corporations. As I drove across the Arctic Circle in my rental car, just a few hours north of Fairbanks, it was with a Starbucks Venti latte still clutched in my hand. The latest invasions have begun.
So, unlike the Arctic Ocean seafloor, even our northernmost landmasses are hardly a vacant frontier. Siberia has thirty-five million people, most living in million-plus cities. Canada and Alaska share thirty-four million, the Nordic countries twenty-five million. However, we are still talking about some of the lowest population densities on Earth, especially in Canada and Russia with only three and eight people per square kilometer, respectively (see preceding table). If all Canadians could be airlifted from their cities and sprinkled uniformly across the country, every man, woman, and child would get their own eighty-two-acre spread. The same exercise in China would yield less than two acres per person; in India less than one.393 But no landscape on Earth is settled uniformly like that. We concentrate in specific places for specific reasons—for arable soil, at strategic trading crossroads, along rivers, and so on. Physical limitations have always influenced human settlement patterns in the past, and they will continue to do so in the future. Obviously, one of the biggest limitations on human settlement in these northern areas has always been the cold.
The Uneven Cold
As a general rule the higher the latitude the more severe the cold (and seasonality, of course)—and the fewer the people. However, being near an ocean does change things. Thanks to the geography of continents and the sluggish, heat-carrying thermal properties of water, air temperatures do not simply vary from south to north, or from low elevation to high, but also with distance from a westerly ocean.394
Take, for example, the line of 45° N latitude defined earlier. On the Pacific coast of Oregon, the average January daytime temperature along this line is 52°F. Moving east through the Montana-Wyoming border, South Dakota, and Minneapolis it tumbles to 22°F. Temperatures persist in the low twenties through Green Bay, Wisconsin (home of the Packers), Ottawa (20°F), and Montreal (22°F) but leap abruptly for ship captains on the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to the Gulf Stream current and its north-flowing extensions that carry warm water north all the way from the tropics. Their heat warms 45° N’s land-fall on a beach in southern France (49°F) and lingers for a while over western Europe. But by Milan (40°F) the warm touch is fading again, and by Stavropol, Russia (25°F), it is gone. Tracing the January averages along this single line of latitude, we found temperature swings of over thirty degrees!
This is the so-called continental effect, in which the interiors of continents experience colder winters and hotter summers with distance from a major ocean, especially on their eastern halves.395 The continental effect helps create the numbing cold of the “Siberian Curse” described in Chapter 5, and the southerly dip of permafrost in eastern Canada and eastern Russia. It is what forces people living in Ottawa to bundle into parkas in winter, while due east in Milan they get by with light jackets and fashionable scarves. It is an important reason why the northern penetration of human settlements has been greater in western Canada than eastern Canada, and in western Russia than eastern Russia. Together with heat from the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current, it explains why most of the Eurasian population north of 45° N is piled onto the western end of the continent, and thus the historical agrarian settlement pattern of Europe.
The Coastal and Lowland Imperative
Another important consideration for human settlement patterns, especially in cold places, is terrain.396 Even prehistoric nomadic hunters, who worried little about permafrost or crop yields, preferred low-lying valleys and coasts.
The reason again is temperature. High elevations are colder than low elevations, and usually more rugged too. As a general rule of thumb, air temperatures fall roughly 6.5°C for each kilometer of increased elevation (18.8°F per mile). Thus, high-elevation ground is colder. It allows permafrost to exist farther south than it otherwise would in the mountains of Norway, the mountain cordillera of western Canada, and on the Tibetan Plateau. In Russia east of the Yenisei River, high elevation compounds the continental effect, making these lands among the coldest on Earth. They are deeply frozen in permafrost, useless for agriculture, and frighteningly cold in winter. In North America, temperatures grow colder mainly from south to north, but in Russia, it’s from west to east.
For these and other reasons the northern high latitudes have never been a strong draw for southern settlers. Their extreme seasonality makes for a short (if intense) growing season. Abundant water and hot summers create a moist haven for hordes of mosquitoes. The freshly scoured landscape, exposed only since the last ice age, has poorly developed soils. Biological richness is low and essentially still colonizing since the glaciers’ retreat. It’s not surprising, therefore, that our past historical expansions have left vast northern land areas only lightly touched.
In Canada, most French and British colonial settlements hugged southern coastlines and rivers. Farms would later spread across her low, flat prairies, bracketed by rugged mountains to the west and rocky Precambrian crystalline shield to the east. All of Alaska’s major settlements are either in low-elevation terrain, along the coast, or both. Norway’s long-axis mountain spine crowded its settlements along its shores where grew societies of fishermen, explorers, and (now) offshore oil and gas drillers. Sweden, Finland, and northwestern Russia, in contrast, are low-elevation and permafrost-free. They have been widely settled since prehistory and their reindeer- herding, dairy, and cool-weather agricultural societies count among the oldest in Europe.
Given all this, it took prospects of financial gain to attract nonnative settlers to remote northern areas. In the ninth century seafaring Vikings—ancestors of today’s Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes—variously plundered or settled Russia, Greenland, Canada, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. The (re)discovery of North America attracted French and British trappers and traders who penetrated across Canada in search of beaver. From Siberia came the call of sable fur. After defeating the Khan near modern-day Tobol’sk, Russian Cossacks swept three thousand miles
