All I know about germanic tribes is that they start entering the roman empire in the first few centuries AD, but what about before then? How long had they been in Europe and how far back can signs of gemanic culutres be traced?
Southern Scandinavia and Jutland. Speaking from a linguistics point of view, they were descended from the proto-Indo-Europeans, who came from either the Pontic Steppe in southwestern Russia, or possibly Anatolia. The proto-Indo-Europeans emigrated outward around the 4th or 5th millennia BC. Grimm's law, a sound shift that separated proto-Germanic from the other Indo-European languages, occurred around 1000 BC.
By the time the Romans were writing about them, beginning around 150 BC, the Germanic peoples had been divided into several groups: North Germanic, whose surviving languages include Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish (but not Finnish; that's not even Indo-European); West Germanic, whose surviving languages include German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scots; and East Germanic, whose languages went extinct with the death of Crimean Gothic in the 18th Century. The Vandals and the various groups of Goths were East Germanic and were driven out of their home in modern day eastern Germany and Poland by the invading Huns and other groups.
