Several issues with that statement, we largely didn’t have snow bound ancestors largely because survival was significantly more difficult in cold areas. Historic populations also tended to lose a lot of weight in winters due to lack of food.

On top of this mercator projections seriously distort people perceptions of how much land is near the equator vs the north. Africa is 11.73 million square miles with minimal snowfall outside of a few mountains, Europe is 3.9 million square miles. Combine that with warmer areas providing more food and it’s likely the majority of early modern humans never experienced significant snowfall.

This is complicated by ice ages, but people didn’t spend a lot of time on on near glaciers until very recently. Lack of food and warmth where huge issue before relatively advanced though still Stone Age technology.

Another way of thinking about this is to compare animal biomass per square mile in say Mongolia with Ghana.