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³ Especially Hans-Jurgen Sasse, ‘The Consonant phonemes of proto-East Cushitic: a first approximation’, forthcoming in Afroasiatic Linguistics; Paul Black, ‘Lowland East Cushitic: Subgrouping and Reconstruction’ (New Haven: unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1974)Google Scholar; Heine, Bernd, ‘The Sam languages: a History of Rendille, Boni and Somali’ (Nairobi, 1976Google Scholar, unpublished manuscript); and Richard Hayward, work in progress on Qawko subgroup.

⁴ Ehret, C., The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary (forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁵ See especially the recent and current work of D. L. Appleyard of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

⁶ Ehret, C., ‘Cushitic prehistory’, chapter 5 in Bender, M. L. (ed.), The Non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia (East Lansing, 1976).Google Scholar

⁷ Ehret, C., Ethiopians and East Africans: the Problem of Contacts (Nairobi, 1974), chapter 2, 1.Google Scholar

⁸ Maggs, Tim, ‘Some recent radiocarbon dates from Eastern and Southern Africa’, J. Afr. Hist., xviii, 2 (1977), 170.Google Scholar

⁹ Ehret, ‘Cushitic prehistory’.

¹⁰ This inference is made on the basis that the lowest percentages of core vocabulary cognation within Omotic are of the same range as the lowest ones within Cushitic: see Bender, M. L., ‘The languages of Ethiopia: a new lexicostatistic classification and some problems of diffusion’, Anthropological Linguistics, xiii, 5 (1971), especially p. 175.Google Scholar

¹¹ Wendorf, Fred, ‘Late Paleolithic sites in Egyptian Nubia’, in Wendorf, (ed.), The Prehistory of Nubia (Dallas, 1968), ii, especially 941–6, 1058–9.Google Scholar

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¹³ Wendorf, , ‘Late Paleolithic Sites’, 1058–1059.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ehret, C., ‘Omotic and the subclassification of the Afroasiatic language family’, Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Ethiopian Studies (forthcoming).Google Scholar

¹⁵ C. Ehret, ‘Omotic’.

¹⁶ Cohen, M. N., The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture (New Haven, 1977).Google Scholar

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¹⁹ A common presumption of scholars is that domestication of animals arose no earlier than the beginnings of plant domestication: consider the comments on the Tepe Asiab and Ganj-i-Dareh Tepe sites in Iran in Schmandt-Besserat, D., ‘The earliest precursor of writing’, Scientific American, ccxxxviii no. 6 (1978), p. 57Google Scholar. But livestock-raising certainly preceded cultivation in southern Africa and can be suggested to have preceded it in parts of the Middle Nile Basin; cf. Ehret, C., ‘Some thoughts on the early history of the Nile-Congo watershed’, Ufahamu, v, 2 (1974)Google Scholar, for a probable example in that region.

²⁰ For Semitic and Ethiopian plough agricultural terminology used in this article, I am deeply indebted to the materials presented and analysized by Amatruda, W. T., ‘Linguistic evidence for cereal plow agriculture in Ethiopia and the Horn’, unpublished U.C.L.A. seminar paper, 1971.Google Scholar

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²² Hadramaut form, isolated in Asian Semitic and naming a plant native and almost endemic to Ethiopia, must be considered a loanword; medial /h/ arose as an attempt to render the glottalic release of Ethiopic ^*t', an element foreign to Arabic pronunciation.

²³ For the correspondence Agew ø (zero) = Beja /h/ = Chadic ^*Y initial, see C. Ehret, ‘Omotic’, isogloss set for ‘sand’.

²⁴ Appleyard, D. L., ‘Linguistic evidence of non-Semitic influence in the history of Ethiopian Semitic: lexical borrowing in Ge'ez and other Ethiopian Semitic languages’, paper presented to Conference on Ethiopian Origins, School of Oriental and African Studies, 06 1977.Google Scholar

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²⁶ Reconstruction of labialized velar here was suggested by Prof. Russell Schuh of U.C.L.A.

²⁷ Appleyard, ‘Linguistic evidence’.

²⁸ Ehret, Historical reconstruction, table 2.

²⁹ Ehret, Historical reconstruction, table 1.

³⁰ Ehret, Ethiopians, chapter 1.

³¹ Appleyard, ‘Linguistic evidence’.

³² Amatruda, ‘Linguistic evidence’. But the pre-Semitic and Cushitic origin of much of this vocabulary has long been generally recognized by scholars.

³³ Fleming, H. C., ‘Omotic overview’, chapter 13 in Bender, M. L., The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia, 308Google Scholar; see also Ehret, , ‘Cushitic prehistory’, 91–2.Google Scholar

³⁴ As is also cogently argued by Simoons, ‘Some questions’.

³⁵ For a recent review of evidence for the climatic shifts noted here and in the following sentences, see Livingstone, D. A., ‘Late Quaternary climatic change in Africa’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vi (1975), 249–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar