At long last I ahve managed to acquire Alan R. Bomhard's "Indo-
European and the Nistratic Hypothesis" (for the pricy sum of $83!)
I must confess to being disappointed. For this price I was expecting
something better than Mallory's "Search for the Indo-Europeans", but
found instead it was vastly inferior.
His search for the Urheimat of the Nostratic culture identifies a
location and a time - 15,000 BCE in Syria and the Jezira, but he
fails to identify a culture associated with this period.
If one were to look at the culture of this location and time it would
have to be the Epipaleolithic Kebaran culture (found from 18-10,500
BCE) as the ancestor of the Nostratic. The Kebaran culture saw the
introduction of microliths from NE Africa into the Sinai and then
points northwards, and was associated with the diffusion of the bow
and arrow (which had been used in Africa since Ateran times (30,000
BCE)) into the Middle East. There are clear cultural associations in
lithic technologies between the Kebaran culture and the Halfan
tradition in Egypt (24-17,000 BCE).
Blomhard quites Militarev in positing an Arabian homeland for Afro-
Asiatic and suggests it came from the Natufian culture complex,
10,500-8,500 BCE). This would be satisfactory, except....
Except that there is no identified movement of cultures from Asia
back into Africa prior to the neolithic cultures of Merimde and
Fayyum (4,500 BCE) which is far to late to account for the observed
differences in language between Cushitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic
and Omotic. Furthermore there is little evidence of a spread of
Isnan culture from Egypt to the Sahara in the period from 9,000-4,500
BCE, which would have been associated with the spread of Afro-Asiatic
if Militarev and Bomhard's construction is correct.
Furthermore culturally the attempt to get Natufian culture into
Arabian Yemen and across the Bab el Mandib just does not work
culturally. Also difficult to trace is the movement out of Ethiopia
into the Sudan. In fact at this stage we have the clear evidence of
cultural movements from the Sudan and into Kenya and Ethiopia with
the spread of the Khartoum Capsian cultures into East African Capsian
at about 6,000 BCE (pre-neolithic in this area). In fact the Capsian
culture, which appeared first at 8,000 BCE at Qafsa in Tunisia and
lasted until 2,700 BCE in this part of the world, would stand a good
chance of being Proto-Afro-Asiatic. This would coincide fairly well
with the separation of Proto-Afro-Asiatic between a central (Berber-
Egyptian-Semitic) VSO group, and a separate Subject first group on
the periphery, which, with contact with non-Afro-Asiatic peoples
split into a SOV Chushitic and Omotic group (in contact with the
Khoisanian languages of East Africa) and a SVO Chadic group (in
contact with the Niger Khordofanian languages of West Africa), in the
period from 9,500 to 7,500 BCE)
A far better explanation, which fits both cultural and linguistic
evidence is to associate Afro Asiatic with the spread of Ibero-
Maurasian cultures from Tunisia onto the Sahara (15,800 BCE).
Together with the earlier Aterian (30,000 BCE) from which Ibero-
Maurasian culture was derived, this shows clear affinities with the
Egyptian Kharghan culture (which is clearly derivative of those of
the Sahara), from which the Halfan derived. In the following period,
the Fakhurian culture of Egypt (17,000-15,000 BCE shows clear Saharan
links with the Ibero-Maurasian. This could be the bridge to both the
Nostratic Kebaran and the Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages that developed
in the Sahara.
Bomhard recognises the validity of this possible theory when he
states "Another scenario proposed by Martin Bernal , associates the
final disintegration of the Afroasiatic parent language with the
Khartoum Mesolithic and locates the latest Afroasiatic homeland in
modern day Sudan. Bernal notes (1980:4) that 'archaeological
evidence from the Magreb, the Sudan and east Africa [makes it seem]
permissible to postulate that at least three branches of Afroasiatic
existed by the eighth millennium [BCE]'. Thus he (1980:3) dates the
breakup of Afro-Asiatic to no later than 8,000 BCE, after which there
was a rapid expansionoutwards in all directions."
He then quotes Bernal who believes the Khartoum Mesolithic comes from
the Kenyan Capsian which is dated as early as 20,000 BCE.
Nevertheless, this early microlithic culture shows clear evidence of
derivation from the 30,000 BCE Aterian of the western Sahara,
enabling us to consider once again the Western Sahara as the Urheimat
for Afro-Asiatic.
This corelates well with the evidence of a spread of African cultural
traits into Palestine in the Minhata phase, which saw African hunter-
gatherers replace Pre-Pottery Neolithic IIIC cultures in the Sinai
and saw an amalgam nomadic pastoralism spread from there up the
Jordan to Syria. This 6,500 BCE spread of cultures may have been
associated with the spread of Semitic.
As Bomhard says "The implications of Bernal's views are enormous.
Though his views are highly speculative, they are by no means
implausible. Should they turn out to be true, it would give
substancial weight to the argument that Afro-Asiatic is to be viewed
as a sister language to Proto-Nostratic rarther than its descendent."
(p.109).
This is certainly the case if Bomhard is right in his location of
Proto-Nostratic in the location he gives. This would have huge
implications on the map Bomhard gives on p.109, for the spread of
Nostratic. It also would make the spread of Nostratic languages more
similar to the maps for the spread of Agriculture. Clearly as
climates warmed after the Glacial maximum (18,000 BCE) it was easier
for cultures to move out of Africa and off the Sahara and into the
Middle East than the other way around.