More or less, yes. Wind direction and overall latitude still play a large role. The valley could also be arid if the opening were on the leeward side.
True, but given the river flowing through the valley, I presume most of the mountain icecaps feed into it by geography, so if the wind direction shifts it's likely to still continue feeding if for no other reason than path of least resistance.
Though a nice stable nook at the core of your civilization also can be bad since it makes it harder to change if you're TOO stable(not that SV faces that problem since we make our own hell)
The most dangerous things you know are large cats and the occasional pack of wolves wandering in from the northern parts of the steppes, which are all smallish, nimble hunters. Lone, large beasts are, in your hunters experience, mostly prey species that got separated from their herds and for those, the tactics they had used would have worked fine.
The core problem is that your tribe uses small throwing spears with wooden or bone tips, due to never having had a source of flint in the steppe. Not exactly the best tools against something that has evolved to survive a scuffle with other one ton mountains of bad attiude and the claws to back up that temper.
I actually figured the core problem was that Boldness is trending. Our hunters, high on the success of daring to try new things, and how everything they touched seemed to go right...were more reckless than normal.
Now the big difference between Steppe Hunters and Hill Hunters. Steppe hunters usually run into wolves and tigers, these predators usually flee after being blooded unless they have significant superiority, allowing a human hunter to chase and eventually just outlast them to exhaustion. This is partly because they're built light on the steppes, and to stay fed, a dense hide and skeleton is simply too nutritionally expensive for creatures that must range a wide territory.
Hill hunters soon learn to avoid the shit out of marked apex predator territory...but at the same time such predators are usually fairly sessile, their nutrition demands more or less means a mature apex predator would park on a good spot with shelter and plenty of food, then not leave it much, and so you can fight the aggressive young leaving the den, but you don't go and aggro the bear.
What they SHOULD have done is to maintain a threatening posture, try to look like too much trouble to eat, and back off. The bear wasn't going to go to too much trouble to kill you unless in mating season, wounded or with cubs.
But doing so with a Steppe predator would have only attracted a pack to flank and hunt you back.
Oh! So if we find flint here while making new weapons we might stand a snowball's chance in hell against at least doing the bear a bit of damage?
Alternatively we could do some crazy scheme to try to get a tree to fall on the bear, but I'm not sure if we've invented axes yet...
You can hit a bear with a car and the car has good odds of losing. Flint can hurt a bear, but its generally not worth it because again, super thick hide and skull, claws that can peel a car open like a can of tuna.
What you do with bears is lots of traps and thick sturdy walls. Also making sure you know where their territories are. As Apex Predators go they're one of the more chill types and don't go poke it like an idiot.
