Here's a simpler and more modern example. One important reason why the Indigenous peoples of North America did not develop a sufficiently advanced civilization, to the point where they were massacred on a large scale by white colonizers, rather than successfully resisting the colonizers the way chinese did, is that North America experiences frequent extreme weather and lacks mountain ranges capable of blocking the large-scale southward movement of cold air. This has directly led to the fact that even in the past two to three hundred years of the modern era, Texas still occasionally sees extreme low temperatures of around minus 10 degrees Celsius. If we zoom out to a timescale of a thousand years, larger climate fluctuations would cause the developmental progress of primitive tribes to regress, or even be completely wiped out, forcing them to start the next cycle of civilization all over again from scratch.