Challenges to colonizing a temperate climate?

In OTL, Europeans had difficulty colonizing tropical areas due to the diseases, the hotter climate, and the difficulty growing their native crops. What challenges would a people from the tropics have when trying to colonize a temperate region? I can see the lack of a rainy season and the presence of winter being initially devastating but what else would challenge them?
 
In OTL, Europeans had difficulty colonizing tropical areas due to the diseases, the hotter climate, and the difficulty growing their native crops. What challenges would a people from the tropics have when trying to colonize a temperate region? I can see the lack of a rainy season and the presence of winter being initially devastating but what else would challenge them?

Pretty much the same sort of things that bedeviled Europeans trying to colonize temperate areas, plus the native crops issue (in regards to a rainy season being absent).

Colonizing is not easy.
 
Well, Rickets for one thing. While the dark complexion that the inhabitants of tropical regions is essential to avoid getting sunburned and henceforth, cancer, the downside is that in higher lattitudes where there is much less solar radiation specifically less UV light. Ehy is this important?, well when when skin is exposed to UV via a series of chemical reactions involving melanin (The pigment that gives skin colour) vitamin-D is produced and lack of Vitamin-D causes rickets. Now this can be compensated for by eating sources that're rich in vitamin-D however the problem would be knowing which sources have which turns out to be mainly from animal sources such as cod-liver oil.
 
You could always look at the experience of the Polynesians in colonising New Zealand. They left from the central Pacific and worked their way down there, island hopping in parts, not in others. NZ is temperate/sub tropical,

hey were in a difficult situation for other reasons, but I do understand that they had trouble with the crops and animals they were able to bring. Their food package being appropriate for warmer climates and different land types, it apparently did take them some time to acclimitise upon arrival and whilst they were able to do so, the crops that worked tended to require a lot of effort and so they ended up concentrated in the warmer North Island and northern tip of the North Island.

They may well have been able to infill the lower South Island given time, but at the point of sustained European contact, the communities there tended to be rather small, with very limited gardening/cropping facilities - almost more towards the hunter gatherer side of the spectrum than their northern neighbours.

https://www.niwa.co.nz/education-and-training/schools/resources/climate/overview
 
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So with rickets, we might see a small but significant lightening of the population to deal with the decreased sunlight. Would adopting wheat, barley, and maize minimize the challenges of settling a temperate climate and how hard would it be for people that already plant cereal crops to plant these new crops? Would the common cold be a huge killer?
 
So with rickets, we might see a small but significant lightening of the population to deal with the decreased sunlight. Would adopting wheat, barley, and maize minimize the challenges of settling a temperate climate and how hard would it be for people that already plant cereal crops to plant these new crops? Would the common cold be a huge killer?
Rickets is overrated as a problem; skin-coloring in general isn't that significant a concern, and populations don't change skin-color that frequently.

The crops package is a much bigger issue. If they have access to wheat, barley and maize, then they can possibly adopt them (and indeed, maize was adopted by European colonizers, and the potato eventually spread everywhere). They'll still have the normal problems of colonization (after all, many European attempts to colonize temperate regions like North America also failed), and will need to make contact with some culture that has a preexisting crops package that works.

The nightmare scenario is something like the above-mentioned Polynesian colonization of New Zealand: no native agriculture (and in New Zealand's case, no natives period), so the colonists only had the tropical crops package they brought with them, and what they could gather from the environment. That meant that many of their crops couldn't grow at all, some could only grow at the most northern tip, and even the most tolerant (the sweet potato) could only grow to a latitude roughly around modern Christchurch. Combined with the rapid extinction of the moa (large native birds that could be hunted for food), and you quickly ended up with a population collapse, and a situation in which large portions of the South Island were extremely sparsely inhabited, with natives surviving on what would in other contexts be considered last-ditch starvation foods.
 
How much of a problem would scurvy become in this context? Populations used to having access to fresh plant food year-round would be unfamiliar with the disease and ignorant of the common cures. In northern Europe, it was a typical winter sickness.

Also, while the various winter infections that go around annually would probably not be a lethal barrier, like the fevers and runs of the tropics, I wonder how they would be perceived by a group of unseasoned colonists. The common cold is anything but harmless if your immune system isn't geared to fighting it.
 
How much of a problem would scurvy become in this context? Populations used to having access to fresh plant food year-round would be unfamiliar with the disease and ignorant of the common cures.

If they retained their taste for citrus fruits, they might not have to worry about the disease. And if they have a sailing tradition, then they'll know how to treat scurvy. Also, how do tropical people have year-round food supply? In Africa at least, the dry season comes twice a year and takes up approximately half of the year and I assume it's the same in other parts of the world. Given that, the concept of storing food for later consumption wouldn't be foreign.

I suppose another question would be what would be the push and pull factors for colonizing a temperate region. I can see a particularly long and severe drought prompting a migration to the north. And IIRC, temperate areas are overall an easier place to live due to less disease and more fertile soils. Depending on what the industry of the native population is like, timber and coal could also be reasons to settle a temperate area.
 
Depends on where they're starting out. It's much easier to colonize China from Southeast Asia than it is to colonize the Mediterranean from Subsaharan Africa.
If they retained their taste for citrus fruits, they might not have to worry about the disease.
They wouldn't necessarily have a taste for citrus in the first place. Citrus are native to Southeast Asia and weren't spread around until fairly late. It's also rather difficult to grow citrus in most temperate climates.
 
I would say the crop package is actually a overblown itself, on the condition that the theoretical colonizer had access to long distance trade routes. The Cholas, various Indonesian empires or the Malians, for instance all had trade networks with temperate areas: The Cholas and Indonesian maritime empires like Srivijaya regularly traded with cooler areas, like North India or China via sea, while the Malians had the gold-salt trade that linked them with the rest of Dar-Al-Islam, and its temperate crops and agricultural technologies. So, colonizing temperate Australia or even the Pacific coast of the Americas for the former two would be no big deal: Just as the Polynesians brought useful canoe plants with them, the Cholas or the Srivijayans could easily bring temperate plants in their ocean-going ships.

Even just trade with or access to temperate-like mountains in the tropics, including at home, such as New Guinea Highlands, for a much more extensive ATL* "Trans-New Guinean Expansion, preceding and taking the place of, and perhaps being even more extensive than, the Austronesian Expansion, could enable easy colonization of New Zealand and South Australia, or further still.

Finally, even continental expansion could lead to colonization of temperate areas by tropical peoples, such as if the Inka Empire expanded further into the Southern Cone: Potatoes, Andean lupins, llamas, alpacas and quinoa, amongst other highland crops, do quite perfectly fine there in OTL, so the same could be expected for an ATL eastward Inka Expansion into the Pampas, for example.

*Note: The ATL I linked to is NOT mine :eek:
 
Depends on where they're starting out. It's much easier to colonize China from Southeast Asia than it is to colonize the Mediterranean from Subsaharan Africa.

They wouldn't necessarily have a taste for citrus in the first place. Citrus are native to Southeast Asia and weren't spread around until fairly late. It's also rather difficult to grow citrus in most temperate climates.
Have a look here, at the Kerguelen Cabbage. For the record, citruses are also native to Australia.
 
If they retained their taste for citrus fruits, they might not have to worry about the disease. And if they have a sailing tradition, then they'll know how to treat scurvy. Also, how do tropical people have year-round food supply? In Africa at least, the dry season comes twice a year and takes up approximately half of the year and I assume it's the same in other parts of the world. Given that, the concept of storing food for later consumption wouldn't be foreign.

It's not a matter of storing foods (I don't think there's anyplace on earth that doesn't have cyclical availability of crops), but one of fresh plant matter to supply vitamin C. As far north as the Mediterranean, wherever you do not have lasting snows, you can have fresh plants of some description (often leaves or shoots) throughout the year. AFAIK eating those was universal (it certainly was around the Med and in the Middle East). People were probably unaware of the health benefits, but they got them. In areas where you have a sifgnificant season without any fresh crop plants, you have to do something to avoid scurvy (or get it, as people in Norway or Iceland regularly did). But someone who doesn't live in such latitudes would not know that this is necessary, and learning curves for colonists could be costly.

A sailing tradition might help, though that depends on how long they keep the sea and what they eat on board. Scurvy only becomes a problem on very long voyages with no revictualling stops. Even before the introduction of lime rations, most European navies managed to contain the problem on regular cruises.
 
Finally, even continental expansion could lead to colonization of temperate areas by tropical peoples, such as if the Inka Empire expanded further into the Southern Cone: Potatoes, Andean lupins, llamas, alpacas and quinoa, amongst other highland crops, do quite perfectly fine there in OTL, so the same could be expected for an ATL eastward Inka Expansion into the Pampas, for example.
Most highland crops do not grow very well in the southernmost parts of South America. They don't grow well in North America either. There's a reason why (several reasons, actually) the only Andean crop to be grown on a wide scale is the potato, and why only quinoa and potatoes made it as far south as Chile. While they can handle some cold (but not heavy frost), they evolved near the equator where day length doesn't vary too much with the seasons. In temperate regions, the long days of summer prevent many tropical crops from maturing until days are shorter in autumn. This means that they often get wiped out by frost before they can be harvested. Potatoes and quinoa required selection for long-day varieties before the could be grown outside of the Incan empire. Day length sensitivity was also one of the factors that slowed the spread of maize north into what is now the United States. While it's not a completely insurmountable problem, it's a pretty tough one to overcome.

Places with Mediterranean climates are also huge obstacles for people that rely on tropical crops. Without extensive water transportation infrastructure, they would be forced to stay near permanent water sources.
Yes, but none of them are domesticated. Unless you're writing a timeline on the colonization of northern Asia by Australian aborigines, the Australian citrus species can be ignored.
 
Places with Mediterranean climates are also huge obstacles for people that rely on tropical crops. Without extensive water transportation infrastructure, they would be forced to stay near permanent water sources.

Yeah, the fact that the Bantus never colonized the Cape region of South Africa speaks to the difficulty people can have to adapting tropical crops to Mediterranean conditions. Though that may have also been due to the intervening near desert-like climate. Why would there need to be extensive water transportation infrastructure? Most tropical crops (at least for Africa) are drought tolerant so a little water wouldn't be that big of a concern.
 
It also depends on how the coloniser colonises.

If we are talking about organised multi generational efforts in the most recent European model that is one thing, if we are talking about the more traditional slow and haphazard pre modern then that is another.

I would imagine it is pretty hard work to plan and then implement crop transfer and acclimatisation if the British experience was anything to go by.
 
Yeah, the fact that the Bantus never colonized the Cape region of South Africa speaks to the difficulty people can have to adapting tropical crops to Mediterranean conditions. Though that may have also been due to the intervening near desert-like climate. Why would there need to be extensive water transportation infrastructure? Most tropical crops (at least for Africa) are drought tolerant so a little water wouldn't be that big of a concern.
Because all crops, no matter how drought tolerant, need more water than the zero inches that most Mediterranean climates receive in the summer. If you have access to cool season crops, this isn't a problem because you can simply farm in the winter and spring when rainfall occurs, but most tropical crops can't tolerate cool weather. I wouldn't be surprised if this was one major reason why native Californians never adopted Mesoamerican crops.
 
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