Proto-Afroasiatic homeland
The majority of scholars today contend that Afroasiatic languages arose somewhere in Northeast Africa or Western Asia[5] There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken.
[8] Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact, with the evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples.
Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with the Levantine Post-Natufian Culture, arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area.
Scholar Jared Diamond and archaeologist Peter Bellwood have taken up Militarev's arguments as part of their general argument that the spread of linguistic macrofamilies (such as Afroasiatic, Bantu, and Austroasiatic) can be associated with the development of agriculture; they argue that there is clear archaeological support for farming and associated tools and domesticated animals spreading from the Levant into Africa via the Nile valley.
[14][16] Militarev, who linked proto-Afroasiatic to the Levantine Natufian culture, that preceded the spread of farming technology, believes the language family to be about 10,000 years old.
[5][25] Within this hypothesis there are a number of competing variants: Christopher Ehret has proposed the western Red Sea coast from Eritrea to southeastern Egypt.
While Ehret disputes Militarev's proposal that Proto-Afroasiatic shows signs of a common farming lexicon, he suggests that early Afroasiatic languages were involved in the even earlier development of intensive food collection in the areas of Ethiopia and Sudan.
Ehret argues that Proto-Afroasiatic speakers in Northeast Africa developed subsistence patterns of intensive plant collection and pastoralism, giving the population an economic advantage which impelled the expansion of the Afroasiatic languages.
Roger Blench has proposed a region in the adjacent Horn of Africa, specifically in modern day Ethiopia, arguing that Omotic represents the most basal branch and displays high diversity.
[9] Igor Diakonoff proposed the Eastern Saharan region, specifically the southern fringe of the Sahara as possible location of the Afroasiatic homeland.
[3][32] The details of his theory are widely cited but controversial, as it involves the proposal that Semitic originated in Ethiopia and crossed to Asia directly from there over the Red Sea.
The "Ethio-Somali" genetic component is prevalent among modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations, and found at its highest levels among Cushitic peoples in the Horn of Africa.
[39] Genetic research on Afroasiatic-speaking populations revealed strong correlation between the distribution of Afroasiatic languages and the frequency of Northern African/Natufian/Arabian-like ancestry.
[40] Genetic studies on a specimen of the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic excavated at the Luxmanda site in Tanzania, which has been associated with migrations of Cushitic-speaking peoples and the spread of pastoralism, found that the specimen carried a large proportion of ancestry related to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture of the Levant (Natufian), similar to that borne by modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations inhabiting the Horn of Africa.
He noted that variants are also found in the Aegean and Balkans, but the origin of the M35 subclade was in Egypt or Libya, and its clades were dominant in a core portion of Afro-Asiatic speaking populations which included Cushitic, Egyptian and Berber groups, in contrast Semitic speakers showed a decline in frequency going west to east in the Levantine-Syria region.
