Quote:
This doesnt make much sense by any meanings. Neolthic expansion took place in an area where people are known to have spoken formerly "isolated languages"
They became isolated latter and are only isolated today because links to other languages are not known or have died out.
All languages must ultimately have a common origin if people have a common origin.
We can assume that much of the Near East (including Levant) would have been Afro-Asiatic and South Caucasian speaking by then. Thus as neolithic farmers spread into Europe they'd have spread Afro-Asiatic and replaced earlier languages.
Sumerian is an isolate because we don't know languages it is linked to yet. Some people say Dravidian, but I find that hard to believe.
Isolates don't just appear out of nowhere, they become isolated via isolation and divergence, not because people wake up speaking a different language one day.
Quote:
While Afro Asiatic languages where clearly introduced into West Asia (the northern part where Farming and Pastoralism developed) from an area somewhere between North Africa and the Levant and is associated with the spread of E1b1b* Haplogroup and came in contact with Neolthic Groups with the spread more into the Levant and Mesopotamia by taking some J* and G* lineages.
Yes, and thus Afro-Asiatic would very likely have been spread throughout much of Europe by Neolithic farmers.
Earlier languages from the Mesolithic wouldn't have survived if the Mesolithic peoples adopted the way of life of the farmers that spoke Afro-Asiatic. However Basque and a few of the pre-IE languages could have been exceptions.
Quote:
If we assume that Afro-Asiatic was the language of Neolthic farmers than we would have to assume that Neolthic lifestyle was introduced to West Asia through North Africa and the Levant, while it actually is the other way around and a strong Caucasoid input into Africa came from the Near East.
Quote:
The Horn of Africa, particularly the area of Ethiopia and Eritrea, has been proposed by some linguists because it includes the majority of the diversity of the Afroasiatic language family and has very diverse groups in close geographic proximity, sometimes considered a telltale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Within this region there are several 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. In other words, he proposes an even older age for Afroasiatic than Militarev, at least 15,000 years old and possibly older, and believes farming lexicon can only be reconstructed for branches of Afroasiatic.
In the next phase, unlike many other authors Ehret proposed an initial split between northern, southern and Omotic. The northern group includes Semitic, Egyptian and Berber (agreeing with others such as Diakonoff). He proposed that Chadic stems from Berber (some other authors group it with southern Afroasiatic languages such as Cushitic ones).
Quote:
The Levant/Near East. Supporters of a non-north or north east African origin for Afroasiatic are particularly common among those with a background in Semitic or Egyptological studies, or amongst archaeological proponents of the "farming/language dispersal hypothesis" according to which major language groups dispersed with early farming technology in the Neolithic.[13][14] The leading linguistic proponent of this idea in recent times is Alexander Militarev. Arguments for and against this position depend upon the contested proposal that farming-related words can be reconstructed in Proto-Afroasiatic, with farming technology being widely thought to have spread from the Levant into Africa.
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. He wrote (Militarev 2002, p. 135) that the "Proto-Afrasian language, on the verge of a split into daughter languages", meaning, in his scenario, into "Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian, Semitic and Chadic-Berber", "should be roughly dated to the ninth millennium BC".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Asiatic_Urheimat
IMO Afro-Asiatic could have been spread by neolithic farmers to Europe. I don't see any contradictions yet.
