Colonizing a fresh Earth : where to place the first settlements?

Context

A God contest is organized. Each participants starts with a human-free alternate Earth and a certain amount of god-credits to buy humans and supplies. Some Gods used a big part of their budget to acquire Legendary Artifacts such as a duplication machine or a magical sperm bank, and others preferred to do go with the number and buy a lot of humans.

Judges evaluate the participants every hundred years and give to each god grades based on a lot of (sometimes contradictory) criteria.
Examples of criteria : increase of population, surface colonized, technological advances, originality of Arts techniques, efficiency of governments, weirdness of religions, complexity of languages, diversity of cultures, number of bananas eaten per day, etc.

Most contestants specialize in a few specific domains.

Our Contestant

One god chose the "strength in number" approach and bought a huge bulk of randomly generated humans, with hunter-gatherer tech level, basic notions of agriculture and a few tools.

His goal is to create the most diverse possible cultures/civilizations in one thousand years. He is looking for a set of locations where hunter-gatherers would survive and multiply, and that are different and distant from each other.

He already selected a few areas to drop off his humans :

• Manaus, Brasil : in the hearth of Amazonia, starting point for a Rain Forest civilization.

• Thunder Bay, Canada : Great Lake area, the northernmost location of this list.

• Haridwar, India : close to the source of the Ganges, where it's still close to the Indus, the settlers will then follow the river stream to colonize the rest of the subcontinent.

• Palermo, Sicilia : fertile island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.

• Vanderbijlpark, South Africa : has a river, copper and iron ore in the general area (I wanted a settlement with access to both, but I'm not sure this is the best choice)

• Pape'ete, Tahiti : good starting point for an Polynesian culture.

• Launceston, Tasmania : safe starting place before colonizing Australia, has fresh water.

(ugly) Map of the settlements :

My Question

I'm trying to extend this list but every good location I find seems too similar to a location I already selected. At this point I need only one new settlement area.

What is the best location to complete the list ?

It should allow hunter-gatherers to thrive, be reasonably close to other colonizable lands, and be situated in a biome not yet present in the list.

The objective here is to diversify the cultures, which are strongly influenced by their environment, so I'm looking for a place with unique flora, fauna, natural resources, climate or geologic features.

Note : If you propose a list of places sharing the exact same features, I'll accept it as one answer.

posted about 9 years ago

Babika Babaka‭

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