15,000 BCE onward: (The Mechanism of Cultural Encounter — When New People Arrive Bringing Techniques That Allow Them to Produce More Food from the Same Amoun…

15,000 BCE onward: (The Mechanism of Cultural Encounter — When New People Arrive Bringing Techniques That Allow Them to Produce More Food from the Same Amount of Land, the Existing Inhabitants Perceive Both a Material and a Spiritual Advantage in Allying with the Newcomers, a Pattern Common in Human History and Evident in the Afian Period, Typically Resulting in the Language of the Incoming People Becoming the Favored Language While a New Cultural Blend Takes Shape): The kind of encounter evident in the Afian period has been quite common in human history. When new people come into an area, bringing with them a set of techniques that allow them to produce more food from the same amount of land, a frequent consequence is that the existing people of the region see these new productive capacities as evidence that the new arrivals have a superior mastery of nature — and that the newcomers possess a more potent connection with the realm of spirit that lies behind nature. And so the previous inhabitants see both a material and a spiritual advantage in allying with those societies and adopting the new practices. A typical historical consequence of this kind of encounter is for a new social formation to emerge, in which the language of the incoming people becomes the favored language of the emerging society, and a new cultural blend takes shape — one that strongly reflects the incoming culture but incorporates elements of the pre-existing one as well. This is the mechanism by which proto-North Erythraic became the dominant language of the Egyptian Nile Valley. It was not imposed by force. It was adopted because the people who spoke it brought something the existing population wanted: a more productive way of living. The grain-harvesting economy was not just a subsistence strategy. It was a prestige system — a demonstration of efficacy that carried spiritual as well as material authority. The proto-North Erythraic speakers did not need to conquer. They needed only to harvest. The grain did the rest.