The Development of Cities

[JDR Dragoon]

c5000BC the last interglacial period ended, the grass lands of the Steppe started to diminish, the Steppe tribes were Pastoral nomads who depended on grass to feed their herds, as population levels rose greater demands were placed on steadily diminishing resources.
The lifestyle of pastoral Nomads is often supplemented by raiding settled agricultural lands, as the fear of Nomadic incursions increase this can be turned from simple raiding for booty into a more sophisticated settlement whereby tribute is paid to avoid Nomad incursions.

I have a hard time seeing how this is applicable to European pre-history in general.

The problem for the Steppe dwellers is that as their numbers increase and the local Economic sustainability of their lands decreases they need more & more external wealth to maintain their lifestyle. When overtime the established settled Agriculture based communities were weakened by raiding & tribute the Steppe tribes could (and did) move in and colonise (a similar pattern can be seen with the Germanic invasions of Celtic Britain), in effect, temporally relieving the overpopulation in the Steppe homelands, but, given humanities predisposition to breed then in time the Steppe population would again reach critical mass and if a strong enough leader came to the fore the whole process would begin again.
As far as the Roman empire is concerned once the Danube river line was breached (308AD ?) then a sort of domino effect could be said to have taken place, with succeeding waves of Gothic/Germanic/Hun/Avans etc etc moving in, some admittedly as Federatii, others as conquerors.

I see very little direct empirical evidence supporting such an interpretation. At best a shaky conjecture. There is no evidence supporting your thesis that overpopulation of the steppes drove anybody anywhere. various tribes came into contact with the Roman empire, yes. But they had their own specific reasons for doing so (which is often lost to us today) and their encounters with the Roman empire played out in wildly different ways.

I know the above is a somewhat glib rendition of several thousand years worth of History, and the process would have been either slowed of hastened by local shorter term climatic changes in the Steppe lands however we do have empirical evidence for it in that it is what happened, not just to the Roman empire, but to China & India all of which experienced Hun incursions, to name just one. In some cases we have written records other egs include linguistics clues or battlefield sites or in the case of China a recently discovered Hun city.

Post Hoc ergo propter Hoc error. Just because we know that people sometimes moved for shorter or longer distances does not mean we can automatically glean the reasons behind them doing so.

Dunno if you can lay your hands on ‘The Times, Atlas of World History’ or somesuch but it’s a fascinating read, the movements of the tribes pictorially laid out with dates etc.

I have. And I don´t agree.