How different, climactically and "food-wise" is the Antarctic Peninsula from the Tierra del Fuego area?
Exactly.
In my original post I was referring to an eventual settlement in the warmer areas of Peninsula Antarctica (of course the High Plateau is not habitable). This is not much different from Greenland, where the southern fjordland is habitable while the center of the island is not at all.
Antarctica was not historically inhabited due to its isolation (the Arctic areas are far better interconnected with the southern warmer lands, allowing easier migrations), but not because it would be fully inhabitable.
The closest native human groups were the Selknam of Tierra del Fuego, and they lacked of the necessary technology to travel from their homeland to the Peninsula Antarctica.
However, I was thinking about a groups of whalers or so, settling there by the 18th century. If they adapt to live there, fishing and hunting seals and seabirds, they might prosper and claim those lands as theirs.
They didn't lack the necessary technology- they had canoes, and some could have easily been blown across or carried across on the currents. Besides, for the purpose of this scenario, it's almost certainly more important that they do lack the necessary technology to travel back to their homeland from the Antarctic peninsula. After all, what on Earth would possess people to take up permanent residence there willingly, when they have the option of simply establishing transient settlements instead?
Err... But you need significant tech to survive in the A(anta)rctic. The Inuit have a whole battery of such, knowing how to hunt seals, make really warm clothes, kayaks to hunt seafood (seals, etc.), which you need, 'cause no one's going to live off the LAND in Antarctica.
But what on earth would they eat when the seals are breeding on land? If you want to survive in that area, you need to be able to feed yourself all year. "There are no native land mammals" in the South Sandwich Islands, according to Wiki, and seals only breed for a few months a year.See the Yaghan people, who were the group which I proposed- the southernmost peoples anywhere in the world. They already lived in an extremely cold environment- an annual rainfall of 1,357 mm (53.42 in), with an average annual temperature of 5.2 °C (41.4 °F), and winds averaging 30 kph (5 Bf), with squalls of over 100 kph (10 Bf) occurring in all seasons (gale force 5% of the time in summer, rising up to 30% of the time in winter); 278 days of rainfall (70 days snow) and 2000 mm of annual rainfall. As such, they'd already had to develop a whole host of adaptations to the harsh climate, both technological and physical- and they endured these conditions when they were naked, without even being bothering to go to the trouble of wearing any clothing at all. All the stranded group in the South Sandwich Islands would have to do would be to start hunting fur seals as well as sea lions, skinning them to wear their furs as clothing, and they'd be set.
But what on earth would they eat when the seals are breeding on land? If you want to survive in that area, you need to be able to feed yourself all year. "There are no native land mammals" in the South Sandwich Islands, according to Wiki, and seals only breed for a few months a year.
So. They NEED to be able to hunt on the sea. Which requires a lot of tech to be developed. The Inuit way of life and tech may have been primitive by European standards, but was incredibly well suited to their way of life.
You did read the article, right? They DID hunt on the sea. And there weren't any native land mammals on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago either. Didn't stop them from surviving there, did it?
Among the most notable animals in the archipelago are austral parakeets, sea gulls, guanacos, foxes, kingfishers, condors, king penguins, owls, and firecrown hummingbirds.
The article says they dove for shellfish. and as for native land animals,
Guanacos are definitely land animals, and so are foxes, and probably whatever the foxes (and owls) were eating.
So, no. Tierra del Fuego and the South Sandwich Islands (let alone Antarctica) are entirely different environments, and your Yaghan would die off in a year.
Note: Tierra del Fuego even has forests! which basically no place that Inuit lived did.
They didn't lack the necessary technology- they had canoes, and some could have easily been blown across or carried across on the currents. Besides, for the purpose of this scenario, it's almost certainly more important that they do lack the necessary technology to travel back to their homeland from the Antarctic peninsula. After all, what on Earth would possess people to take up permanent residence there willingly, when they have the option of simply establishing transient settlements instead?