Harold Crane Fleming (December 23, 1926 – April 29, 2015)[1] was an American anthropologist and historical linguist specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa.
[1] Since 1965, Fleming had been affiliated with Boston University, continuing to the present as Research Fellow in the African Studies Center and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology.
Using data from field work by himself and others, Fleming studied and published touching each of the four language groupings in Ethiopia: Semitic, Cushitic (1976),[2] Omotic (1969, 1970), and Nilo-Saharan,[3] plus the enigmatic Shabo (2002) and Ongota (2006).
He recommended integrating its results with those of physical anthropology, genetics, and archaeology, in order to produce a unified view of human prehistory.
He was deeply impressed by the long-range linguistic probing of scholars in Moscow who were trying to extend genetic taxonomy of human languages beyond the levels achieved in the 1950s and 1960s.