I haven't done the research but if you look at the kinds of groups that are settled above the Arctic Circle and how they got there, vs how a group would have got to Antarctica, it may just boil down to accessibility. Whalers eventually patrolled Antarctica's seas but, if they tried to farm its shores they didn't get very far. The Polynesian settlers of the South Seas are hard to beat for navigation ability, but one imagines that either the seas were not worth crossing, or the lands were not worth populating, to those navigators. On the other hand, Greenland and Iceland have at times supported Europeans and their agriculture.

Antarctica was not well bounded on maps until the Wilkes expedition and others in the 1830's.

A lot of the subantarctic islands have similar weather to the Faroe Islands in the North Sea.

However, the Polynesians were not cold weather people, and the subantarctic islands are extremely remote.

It was hard enough as it was for the Polynesians to settle New Zealand, I can't imagine them settling any further south.