[3] Peter Robertshaw in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, offers a more measured conclusion: "Ehret has produced a remarkably coherent and detailed history which should spur further research".
She concludes: "The most important achievement of Ehret’s book is that finally the early history of the continent is taken seriously and is presented in detail and form that do justice to its complexity and depth.
[6] Ehret's linguistic tome, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (1995), is the subject of a detailed review article in Afrika und Übersee by the distinguished scholar of Afroasiatic languages, Ekkehard Wolff.
Wolff writes: "Ehrets opus magnum ist ein Parforce-Ritt durch schwierigstes Terrain, bei dem sich der Reiter auch an die steilsten Hindernissen überraschend gut in Sattel hält und an nur einer einzigen Hürde nach Meinung des Rez.
("Ehret’s opus magnum is a steeplechase ride through the most difficult terrain, in which the rider stays in the saddle astonishingly well even at the steepest obstacles and, in the opinion of the reviewer, crashes at only a single hurdle (…tone).
This particular book appeared in the same year as another comparative work on the same language family, Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova's Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a Reconstruction.
Václav Blažek, in a review article originally prepared for Afrikanische Arbeitspapiere, presents additional data, most of which, in his words, "confirm Ehret’s cognate sets".
)[10] Roger Blench, a development anthropologist, published a critical comparison of Ehret's and M. L. Bender's comparative work on the Nilo-Saharan family in Africa und Übersee in 2000—from its date, seemingly written before the book came out.
He has also collaborated with geneticists in seeking to correlate linguistic with genetic findings (e.g., Sarah A. Tishkoff, Floyd A. Reed, F. R. Friedlaender, Christopher Ehret, Alessia Ranciaro, et al., "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans", Science 324, 22 May 2009) and in developing mathematical tools for dating linguistic history (e.g., Andrew Kitchen, Christopher Ehret, Shiferew Assefa, and Connie Mulligan, "Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East," Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, July 2009).