Hi Dennis
In reply to your point
> > > Why did the Semites have to come from Egypt? Ethiopia, the
presumed
> > Semitic homeland, is also one of the "centres of origin" of
> > agriculture.
I wrote
> > Dennis, there was a long discussion about this earlier on the
list.
> > I
> > proposed an Ethiopian origin, crossing the Red Sea to Yemen, and
was
> > shot down in flames. Despite the fact that Semitic languages in
> > Ethiopia are more numerous and more diverse than elsewhere
> > (evidence of potential origin sites), it was pointed out that the
> > Ethiopian crops for the origin of Agriculture were domesticated
only
> > post 3,000 BCE, too late for the appearance of Semites to be
> > associated with a dispersal zone from Ethiopia.
> >
To which you have replied
> I've gone through the egroups archives and found this. Is this what
turned
> you against the Ethiopian origin of Semitic?
> If so, I have the following comments :
>
> Alexander Stolbov wrote on 28/1/2000
> > Still I can't accept the Ethiopian hypothesis.
> >
> > IMO the key counter-argument is the Nostratic conception. If we
> believe in
> > the genetic relatedness of the Nostratic languages we must
> acknowledge that
> > ones upon a time it was a single group whose descendants in many
> millenia
> > have turned into Yukaghir and Hausa, Gauls and Tamils etc.. It
seems
> to me
> > that the most probable place, time and the reason of fantastic
> spreading are > the Near East Region (either Zagros or Levant),
10-12
> millenia BP and the
> > Neolithic revolution (the Near East variant of it, i.e.
goats/sheep +
> > wheat/barley).
It was this discussion that got me thinking about the whole matter,
but it was not the final turning point. I followed up with a great
deal of work into the archaeology of Africa, and from my reading it
appeared that the Sahara was a far better staging ground for many of
the innovations I was seeking. Certainly, between Chadic, Berber,
Egyptian, Cushitic and Omotic it is a fairly central region.
Secondly, more recent work has suggested that it was a cultural
powerhouse until almost historic times. The first microliths, the
first bow and arrow, the first pottery, amongst the first cattle, and
in the Sahel region, a range of crops cultivated fairly early (though
definitely post neolithic). Furthermore the oscillating wet and dry
periods provides a clear "bellows-like" mechanism, drawing people
into
the Sahara, to meet and mingle, developing new technologies as they
do
so, and then to puff them out - north, south, east and north east,
into other areas. By comparison to this Ethiopia was a cultural
backwater. Since the spread of languages tends to go with
technological innovations (eg. Nostratic with microliths, our phantom
substratum (Semitish, Macro-Pelasgian, NE Caucasian, Hatto-Hurrian
etc) Austronesian with the double outrigger, Austro-Asiatic with dry
rice, Indo-European with the horse and the wheel,Chinese with ....),
the Sahara as the Urheimat for Afro-Asiatic makes a lot of sense.
Dennis
> 1. The Nostratic concept is only a hypothesis. It may not be
correct, or at
> least not correct in all its details.
> 2. It is not necessarily true that a proto-language will radiate
outwards in
> all directions from a central point.
> 3. According to Glen's Webpage, the initial split in Nostratic is
into
> Eurasiatic - Kartvelian - AfroAsiatic. So could not AfroAsiatic be
the
> language of those Nostratics who did not migrate?
Agreed.... But if Nostratic is linked to the Mesolithic
broad-spectrum hunting-gathering "Revolution", as everyone seems to
think, this began with the Aterian culture on the Sahara.
> 4. AfroAsiatic itself is not universally accepted, and is based
primarily on
> mass comparison or words, rather than the meticulous sound laws of
IE.
Hmm... Interesting. Then on this count Semitic may be a
non-Afro-Asiatic language that has become Afro-Asiaticised. The
Afro-Asiaticisation is clearly occurring in the hiatus between
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and Ghassulian, when pottery was adopted.
Perhaps Natufian-PPNB people tended to adopt Afro-Asiatic features
from Sinaitic hunter-gatherers to develop Nomadic Pastoralism using
sheep and goats. In which case Semitic did not develop in North East
Africa at all, but on the border of the Negev.... fascinating.
> 5. The Neolithic Revolution
>
> I have been giving quite some thought to the nature of this
revolution. It
> strikes me that this was not a technology-based advance, such as
microlithic
> industry or metallurgy, but rather a knowledge-based revolution.
> After all, what is the qualitative difference between
pre-agricultural
> foraging and cultivation? The foragers would have all the necessary
tools to
> be cultivators - tools for harvesting the wild grains, digging up
roots,
> pulling down fruits off trees; the tools for threshing and
grinding;
and the
> containers for storage. What is new, is the knowledge of how plants
> propagate, i.e. that you can take the seeds and plant them where
you
want
> them to grow, rather than go to where they grow naturally.
> Now, knowledge can be carried by very small numbers of people, even
> individuals or individual families. Also it is not limited to
specific
> plants. The same knowledge will apply equally to millet as to
barley. So, it
> need not be evidence of ethnic migrations or movements or spreads of
> languages.
Interesting speculations Dennis. Your hypothesis stands up pretty
well for the first "gatherer-farmers" - who pioneered bananas, sago,
taro, yams, sugar cane and coconuts in Papua New Guinea about 30,000
years ago. These people seem to have followed the path you set. But
there is two things you have left out of your accounts.
1. The population needs to be sedentary first before thewy can become
farmers. This is necessary to be in a situation of being around for
a
full 12 months to observe the full cycle of the growing season - from
seed to eventual crop. This certainly is the case with every
examined
case of the shift from hunting and gathering to farming for two
reasons.
a. A sedentary population (eg coastal fisherfolk in New Guinea) if
harvesting one very available food source, would tend to deplete the
local availbility of others, resulting in malnutrition. Cultivation
of others then becomes almost essential.
b. The development of a full-fledged farming (as destinct from a
farming suppliment to hunter gathering as happened in the New Guinean
case) only occurs if the population balance seriously gets out of
kilter with the carrying capacity of the hunter-gathering environment.
Farming is more arduous, results in falling quality of life,
is much more disease prone, involves a lot more back-breaking labour
than hunting and gathering. No sane hunter gatherer who could avoid
it would adopt such a lifestyle.
2. The second prerequisites are the presence of potential cultivars.
Not all plants or animals have the necessary biological
pre-adaptations that render them suitable for domestication. It
appears that on the border between cultivation and hunter gathering
cultures are a lot more adventurous about experimenting with crops
and
domesticated animals than are their later descendents, who reduce the
range and specialise in two or three. In the Middle East for
instance, in addition to sheep and goats, early farmers seem to have
experimented with domesticating gazelle too. This was later
abandonned. Egyptians at an early stage domesticated baboons and
cheetah!
Thus we find the limitations of Vavilhov Zones (thanks for the
excellent webpage on this... one point, most leave out the Sahul
Vavilhov zone - sugar cane comes from Australia and New Guinea,
pandanus and macadamia nuts from Australia!)
Sedentarism in Ethiopia is fairly late by comparison to that of the
Middle East. Natufian was sedentary from nearly 8,500 BCE, dependent
upon harvesting wild grains, same in Anatolia and the Armenian
Zagros.
They all found ways of harvesting grains and storing them whilst
still
a hunter-gathering culture. Just harvesting grains begins the
genetic
adaptations that make them domestic prone - the seeds collected are
those less likely to fall from the ear, and mature at the same time
as
the others. These seeds sprouting on the edge of the grain store
would quickly familiarise sedentary gatherers about the nature of
seed-plant-harvest-seed. But only when local supplies of wild grain
close by the place of habitation were exhausted, and the thought of
having to pack-up and shift is either too risky or too burdensome,
would gatherers begin to experiment with saving some of the harvest
for sowing when the wet season arrives again - and then true farming
begins.
The final "push" into full-fledged farming in the Near East seems to
have been aridity. Harvesting the naturally occurring fields of wild
grain is fine when it is wet, but when you move to a semi arid
condition - you either revert to nomadism (as happened with southern
Natufians), or begin farming (as happened with Anatolia and Zagros),
or you perish!
None of these factors applied in Ethiopia until about 3-4,000 BCE.
Dennis again
> The linguistic evidence, together with the traditions of the peoples
> involved, the archaeology (? - I've not really researched this
fully
yet)
> and plausibility, argue for Ethiopia as the point of departure for
the
> AfroAsiatic languages, and neither the Nostratic Hypothesis nor the
> Neolithic Revolution offer any serious obstacles to this scenario.
No, but the archaeology does not quite stack up. The neolithic
transition first in SW Asia is fairly well understood, and long
predates that of Northern or Eastern Africa. The argument occurs
whether neolithic in China or in South East Asia predated that of the
Middle East. I am of the opinion that it did. Certainly Cinese wet
rice grown 7,000 BCE or earlier on the Yangtse River mouth was being
cultivated outside the zone in which the wild ancestors of rice are
found. Spirit Cave in Thailand (circa 10,000 BCE) seems to show
evidence of a hunter-gatherer-neolithic transition. And then there
is
the 12,000 year old evidence of Kuk in Papua New Guinea and the
25,000
year old evidence of the Solomon Islands! The knowledge base for
cropping seems to have been around for long before agriculture
develops. Australian Aborginal people clearly understood the
principles for agriculture, but they were not about to reduce the
quality of their lives as hunter-gatherers!
Dennis
> BTW, I have read somewhere that the origin of agriculture in
Ethiopia dates
> from ca.5000BCE.
Pity you don't know the source.... I'd be very interested.
Regards
John