I was wondering how is it possible that we didn't see the most advanced civilizations appear on tropical regions, as they are most suited to agriculture than subtropical ones. Then I hypothetized that maybe it is the other way around: maybe the lack of resources was the driving force of technological advancement in earlier civilizations, in the sense that it forced people to be ingenious in order to cope with their harsh environments.
Am I on the right track? Is there historical evidence backing me up?
Frankly, I don't think there's a correlation between extreme environments and the development of culture or civilization. We see some of the earliest known civilizations develop in places like the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River - areas that one would "expect" large groups of people could be supported.
However, we also see entire civilizations - the Olmec, coastal desert Andeans, Egypt, chilly England - growing out of what one would consider "inhospitable" or at the very least, uncomfortable, regions of the planet.
When it comes down to it, history - as I see it - hasn't proven that people prefer the "easy" spots. Neither do they seek out the roughest, toughest places to make their way - ultimately, a large impetus for using land or taking new frontiers is simply, "other people live here, it's too crowded! Let's find somewhere else. Oh, I know! The next ridge over isn't so bad!"
This isn't to say folks didn't find incredible ways of dealing with harsh conditions when they were in those positions, but my point is to divorce the Fleetwood Mac-style "YOU CAN GO YOUR OWN WAAAYYY" ingenuity from being deterministic. I would argue that people were not determined or entirely at the whims of their environment; to use a fancy anthropological term, they had agency in their relationship with their surroundings and acted accordingly to understand its effects and impacts on their way of life.