White people don't want to talk about it

[Xithras]

95. In modern society, it has more to do with the trading structures we've set up over the last 2k years

Our major cities are on the coast because, for most of the past 2000 years, sea based trade has been an important aspect of our economic systems. 10,000 years ago, there was no sea based trade in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter). At that time, European populations hugged the coast for a far more fundamental reason. Without vitamin D, your reproductive success drops, you develop musculoskeletal and cardiovascular issues, cancer rates climb, and even your intelligence declines. The importance of vitamin D to the human body can't be understated, which is why we initially developed the ability to create our own. When humans migrated into parts of the world where our built in vitamin D production strategies no longer worked, the easiest workaround was to simply consume it in seafood. This largely limited human populations in Europe to areas where seafood could either be caught directly, or be carried on foot before spoiling. Generally speaking, you're talking about one or two days walk.

But keep in mind that we're also talking about relative populations here. 10,000 years ago, you could have walked from the modern Czech Republic, across southern Germany, and into central France without ever seeing another human being. There WERE people there, but the population was very small and spread out. At the same time, if you tried to walk from Denmark to Calais, France, you probably would have run into other humans every few hours or so. While the populations along the coast were still a fraction of what we see today, they were orders of magnitude larger than the population that existed inland. This is largely because they NEEDED the ocean to stay alive.

As Europe whitened and the dependence of Europeans on the sea for essential nutrients declined, people were able to migrate further inland and settle previously inhospitable areas.