Everything about Proto-afro-asiatic totally explained
Proto-Afro-Asiatic is the hypothetical
proto-language from which modern
Afro-Asiatic languages are descended.
Ilya Yabonovich and other linguists, in examining the differences between the various members of the
Afro-Asiatic family have realised that all of the old etymologies for this group were inherently semitocentric. The differences between
Chadic,
Omotic,
Cushitic and
Semitic, were wider than those seen between any members of the
Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within and between separate language families, for example,
Indo-European and
Altaic. Certainly the exclusion of Afro-Asiatic from the controversial
Nostratic family has simplified matters of phonemics, not having to include the complex patterns seen in Afroasiatic languages. It is today commonly accepted that proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken in
Africa (perhaps the Northeastern
Sahara, for example), but in the past a number of theories were expounded.
Alternative Afro-Asiatic Homelands
The Middle East
Yuri Militarev and V. Shairelman (1988) have suggested that the Afroasiatic homeland was the
Middle East and the
Arabian Peninsula. They suggested that Proto-Afroasiatic was the language spoken by the Epi-Paleolithic (for example
mesolithic)
Natufian culture of
Palestine and
Syria. The
Natufian culture is certainly well documented. The earliest sites, in Palestine, have been dated to 10,900 BCE and the culture continued to 7,800 BCE, during which it metamorphosed, between 8,500 and 8,000 BCE into the first fully blown agricultural neolithic Pre-Pottery A culture, found throughout the Levant. This would correspond well with the date given by
Igor Diakonoff for the Proto-Afroasiatic parent culture (for example approximately 12,000 years ago). The Natufian culture certainly did spread, northwards to Syria and
Mesopotamia, and the
Belbasi culture of interior
Anatolia certainly was of clear Natufian derivation. To the south east, the well studied site of
al Beidha, about 4 kilometres north of
Petra, and the rock shelter of
Wadi al-Mataha has been extensively studied, and show its extension into the fringes of the arid Arabian sub-continent.
Allen Bomhard (1996) tries to keep Afro-Asiatic in within
Nostratic, despite his admission that Proto-Afroasiatic is very different from the other members of the proposed linguistic Nostratic superfamily. As a result he suggests it was probably the first language to have split from the Nostratic speech community. Whatever was the case; by 8,000 BCE the Natufian culture itself had begun to disperse. In Palestine, Natufian developed into the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) culture, first identified by
Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978) in her 1950s excavations at
Jericho. Kenyon also remarked at the hiatus and seeming abandonment of PPNA sites, and was followed by a limited extent of the PPNB culture that was very different. Rectilinear dwellings in the PPNB, from 7,000 BCE, replaced the round beehive dwellings seen since Natufian times, in the PPNA period. Since the 1960s, however, it has been shown that PPNB developed in an unbroken sequence from the Natufian cultures north of
Damascus, forging a link between Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Anatolian cultures of
Catal Huyuk, and
Halicar, with which it shares some similarity. It has been suggested that this northern part of the range was developing as Proto-Semitic. Certainly, there's evidence that the PPNB culture, spread southwards to sites in
Israel, lasting until 6,000 BCE ending with the brief spread of a more arid climate through the region. Christopher Edens (2001) has reported a
bladelet tradition in South Western
Saudi Arabia, possibly synchronous with the Epi-Paleolithic spread of tools of the Arabian bifacial tradition which lasted from 5,000 - 3,000 BCE characterised by beautifully pressure-flaked
arrowheads and
knives. They also used scrapers and
awls or drills, probably for working leather and making beads. The Bifacial tradition, seems to have been the period during which a hunting and gathering way of life was progressively replaced by a lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism from the north, which has since then characterised the Peninsula. This, it has been suggested, saw the first spread of the
Semitic languages throughout Arabia.
Bomhard, following John Kern’s suggestion, proposed that further spread took the Afro-Asiatic languages across the Bab al Mandib in
Yemen into
Ethiopia and thence into the
Horn of Africa and further south. To the north Afro-Asiatic languages are presumed to have crossed with the Neolithic revolution into
Egypt, spreading from there into North Africa, and the
Sudan, and thence across the Sahara to the area of
Lake Chad.
There is thus some evidence in support of this thesis. No evidence has ever been found of a pre-Semitic
substratum in Palestine, indicating a long development there. However, more recent work in African archaeology has pointed to weaknesses in the Nostraticists’ argument. Firstly it appears that the Neolithic in Africa didn't develop as a result of immigrants from the Middle East speaking a new Afroasiatic language. Rather it developed out of a deep tradition of Egyptian Epi-Paleolithic cultures undergoing a long-process of Neolithicisation, with a full Neolithic tradition emerging with the
Badarian (and possibly
Tasian), about 5,000 - 4,500 BCE. It is only with the
Naqada II and
III periods that any evidence of incursions of people from South West Asia can be distinguished. By then agricultural Egyptian Neolithic cultures had a long tradition of their own. Although earlier links can be shown to have existed between Badarian and the Western Desert, and even with
Merimde and the
Fayyum, there are no clear early links back into Palestine or Syria.
Equally in the Horn of Africa, although Arabian influence has now been extended before the
Axumite civilisation, most of the early Epi-paleolithic links seem to have happened in the other direction, from Africa into Arabia, and it's difficult tracing a cultural trajectory sufficiently early enough to have carried the
Omotic and
Cushitic languages into Africa.
Problems with the Middle Eastern theory
This archaeology seems to pose insurmountable problems to a theory of a Nostratic-linked Proto-Afroasiatic language in the Middle East. There is also significant linguistic evidence that suggests that this wasn't the area in which Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages first evolved. Afro-Asiatic linguistic diversity is far greater in Africa than it's in the Middle East. All six of the Afro-Asiatic families are found in the African continent, only one is found in the Middle East. Even in the case of the Middle Eastern Semitic language, the diversity of Semitic languages in Ethiopia, for instance, is greater than that in Arabia, Mesopotamia or the
Levant. The suggestion of a Middle Eastern origin of Proto-Afro-Asiatic of Kerns and Bomhard, just represents a later continuation of the dominance in Afro-Asiatic studies by the Semiticists, and the relative depth of the understanding of the archaeology of this region, by comparison to the much less well understood archaeology of Africa and the Sahara.
The spread of Afro-Asiatic languages has recently been linked to the evolution of the
Y chromosomal E3b Haplogroup. About 21-25 000 years ago the subbranch E3b arose in East Africa and spread northward into North Africa and West Asia, splitting further into another three haplogroups: haplogroup E3b3 spent the last ice age in the Levant and north-east Africa, E3b2 was present in the Maghreb and today it's the most important haplogroup of the Berbers (having arisen among the ancestral population to the Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews[1]); E3b1 originated in East Africa and after the end of the ice age, it expanded north and west. The spreading of E3b1 is probably connected with the spread of the Afro-Asiatic languages.
African homelands of PAA languages have been suggested. Igor Diakonoff (1988) suggested that the
Urheimat of Afro-Asiatic was in the South Eastern Sahara, between
Tibesti and
Darfur. Martin Bernal (1980) also suggests an African origin. Quoted by Bomhard, he states that “archaeological evidence from the
Magreb, the Sudan and east Africa [makesit seem] permissible to postulate at least three branches of Afroasiatic existed by the
8th millennium BCE”. Bomhard concludes, “The implications of Bernal’s views are enormous. Although his views are highly speculative, they're by no means implausible. Should they turn out to be true, it would give substantial weight to the arguments that Afroasiatic is to be viewed as a sister language to Proto-Nostratic rather than a descendent.”
Despite this caveat, Bomhard tries to resuscitate the Middle Eastern origin by approvingly quoting at length from Kerns. “If we assume that the speakers of pre-Indo-European remained in the vicinity of the
Caucasus to a fairly late period (say 7,500 BCE), with the Afroasiatic already extending through Palestine and into Egypt and eventually the rest of North Africa, but with its Semitic branch still in Northern Mesopotamia, high on the upper slopes of the fertile crescent, we've an explanation for the similarity in vocabulary. That this similarity existed to a late period is suggested by the shared words for field, bull, cow, sheep and goat, animals that were domesticated first in the Fertile Crescent. In addition, shared words for star, and
seven suggest a common veneration for that number and perhaps a shared ideology…. If true, it suggests an association that's social as well as geographical”.
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