13,500 BCE: (An Archaeological Correlation — A Cultural Spread in the Middle Fourteenth Millennium BCE Appearing to Fit in Time and Place with the Linguistic…

13,500 BCE: (An Archaeological Correlation — A Cultural Spread in the Middle Fourteenth Millennium BCE Appearing to Fit in Time and Place with the Linguistic Divergence of Proto-North Erythraic into Proto-Boreafrasian and Pre-Proto-Semitic, the Archaeology and the Linguistics Converging Once Again on the Same Period and the Same Geography): One archaeologically attested cultural spread in particular appears to fit in time and place with this linguistic divergence. In the middle fourteenth millennium BCE — that is, around 13,500 BCE — a documented cultural expansion correlates with the proposed divergence of proto-North Erythraic into its two daughter languages. Once again the archaeology and the linguistics converge on the same period and the same geography, each independent line of evidence reinforcing the other. The correlation is not proof — Ehret is always careful about the distinction — but it is the kind of convergence that, accumulated across dozens of such instances throughout his work, builds a case of overwhelming cumulative force. When the linguistic family tree predicts a population split at a certain time and place, and the archaeological record independently shows a cultural spread at that same time and place, the probability that the two are unrelated grows vanishingly small. This is the method at work: not any single piece of evidence carrying the argument alone, but the steady, relentless convergence of independent lines of evidence all pointing in the same direction. And the direction they point is always the same: south to north, Africa to the world.