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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

Then why did those people move? Was it because of climate change? First of all, it seems less like a movement of a warrior group and more like a group migration that included women and children—so why on earth did they have to move that way? I’m curious: is there research on this?

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The Huns drove them out of their lands. The Goths needed to find better lands to support their population. The Roman Empire was weak. The Romans had better land. The Romans couldn't defend their land against the Goths and the Goths couldn't defend their lands against the Huns.

As for the climate change argument this movement of people groups is not uncommon. Rome up until the arrival of the Goths had been dealing with "barbarian" incursions for a thousand years.

Rome invade Gaul, Germany, and Britannia which people seem to omit. There is no argument that climate change forced them too. They did it because they could. The "barbarian" tribes invaded because they could. Both sides in this conflict are human and have human motivations.

The Huns arrived centuries after the Gothic expansion, which reached as far as the Volga river. I assumed the OP's question is (like the linked article) about that expansion from Scandinavia south and east, not the later one west into the Roman Empire.

I was visiting the northern city of Umeå in Sweden, in the middle of the winter. It's a bit dark, and in a good year you get a mantle of snow that reaches waist-high, and that was a good year. So I'm sitting in this super-cozy fika room with nice warm lighting having some coffee. Out of the blue, this sweet middle aged lady who had been born there a good half a century before and who loves skiing, says: "I can't bear the darkness any longer. I'm going to Spain this year."

I was wondering the same things : I often heard that the relative civilizational collapse that happened in europe during the middle ages was correlated with lower overall temperatures, e.g. what you see here [1] or there [2]. In the second one, the most recent projections (in red), show that there were a lot of very cold years (down to -0.6 degrees relative to normal) during those times. Later on, starting in the 1200s, there was the Little ice age, where temperatures fell to -0.9 relative to normal (I don't know how they defined normal). The peak, when almost all years were at -0.6 or below on that scale, caused the "General Crisis of the seventeenth century" where people from the Goth/scandinavian regions also had huge famines [3].

So my guess would be that there were several very cold years in a row, which caused famines, and the populations understood that their best survival chance was to migrate south, where they had to compete with the roman empire for land.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:2000_Year_Temperature_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931...

For many decades, climate events have been viewed as one driver of cultural events during the Age of Migrations: somewhere on the Asian steppe, decline in quality pasturage successively causes one people to pressure another people to their west, and eventually the avalanche rolls into Europe.

It has saddened me to see this viewpoint associated in the American cultural wars with one party's "enemy camp", where discussion of climate as a problem is automatically associated with all kinds of unrelated policy positions. People are unaware this historical explanation was posited by hoary old (and largely long-dead) twentieth-century men who had no dog in the contemporary political divide.

Overpopulation, Scandinavia did not have very fertile soil.

This is often said (also about the Viking age) and it seems such an incomplete explanation to me. Normally if more people are born than the land can feed, then vulnerable people (eg babies and kids and elderly) die at higher rates until the balance is restored. Why would Scandinavia be different?

They didn’t just have the motivation to leave, they also had the opportunity.

Their longboats made them amphibious. Their ships were durable enough for the open ocean, but still able to land on any beach, or sail fair upriver.

The Goths had boats, sure, but they were never on the open ocean. Their seafaring was limited to the Baltic Sea, which is basically a big lake in terms of sailing challenges.

There are often cultural elements in that balance. Many societies had cultural adaptations that lowered fertility under normal circumstances but enabled faster repopulation after a crisis. But if there was an outlet for excess people, the base reproduction rate could be higher.

For example, the Roman Republic had adapted to constant warfare and the steady stream of casualties caused by it. And then the Late Republic got into trouble, because Rome had become too good at war, and the required casualties didn't happen.

The Irish solution was mass emigration and blaming the English.

They had too many births before the potato famine -- it's the reason why it was such a disaster in Ireland compared to the rest of Europe -- and they continued up until a few decades ago. This happened during a time when it was unusually easy to move to "empty" land and colonize it.

It had to do with inheritance. Younger sons in the viking era did not inherit the farmstead and had to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Anytime they had a population explosion, younger sons would have to go A Viking.

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