Not at all: it was the fact that the founding fathers of the rest of us trekked their way across the world out of Ethiopia before there was any such commodity as oil to fuel transportation that we find ourselves where we do. People always travelled; they had to once they'd ruined the land where they were.
Later on they did it for kicks or conquest, often the same thing. A little friendly rape 'n' pillage was huge incentive for the poor sods who had to don the armour and follow the leaders. Hot damn, even the travel expenses were paid by the state! Maybe that's where the attraction of location shooting today really comes from.
And so it continues...
Rob C
In your first example, it took more than 10,000 years for them to reach all major continents. They had to keep doing it because that was only way for them to survive because of limited resources in any given locale for any hunter-gatherer bands of humans. When population could no longer be sustained, they had to split and move on. In other words, they didn't travel for leisure or for sightseeing even though that might have been the best time for traditional landscape photographers/painters and poets if they had existed then.
In your second example, they did it out of necessity because of the social/political/economic driving forces behind those events. In other words, they didn't do it for leisure or sightseeing, as the term travel used in the modern lexicon, such as travel industry.
If you look back at the dawn of modernity some 500 years ago, people traveled to far away places looking for resources to benefit their masters/nobility/clergy/money class. The concept of sovereign state was invented so that a structure could be instituted to carry out those large-scale, expensive, labor-intensive, resource-intensive sea voyages that couldn't be done by any small group of 'entrepreneurs.' Before modernity, knights purchased and maintained their own weaponry and horses. Kings/queens didn't pay for knights' services since it was their duty to fight for their kings/queens for free. With the age of fire arm arriving at the dawn of modernity, weaponry suddenly became very expensive and largely stayed out of reach of knight class, that had been largely devastated financially due to the plague started about 100 years earlier killing lots of labor aka peasantry . By now, kings started to demand payment from knights so that kings could finance their own purchases of weaponry, and hire their own mercenaries. At this particular juncture , a small number of those knights, who were still financially capable and had bigger asset base, submerged and transformed themselves by pouring their leftover money into resource-seeking (aka trade) projects with other nobility and merchant class to become the all new capital-holder class. Subsequently, some of them and their sons/grandsons were employed by the state as military commanders so that they could ditch their other day job as archbishops entirely. Of course, Joe 6Packs got drafted into service to fight and die for capital holders. This whole episode of the European history couldn't have happened without Martin Luther's Reformation movement paving the road first because for the first time money had been regarded as something not only just good but also holy openly (since one can do God's work with it now.) Europe at this time entered what later called capitalism.
In retrospect, before John D Rockefeller made oil cheap by streamlining the entire process , the percentage of people who were able to afford to travel for leisure was very very small since only the ruling class, ie nobility/clergy, was able to afford the financial cost and time cost. Sightseeing for the masses is a very recent development brought by Rockefeller's cheap oil.