20,000–16,000 BCE: (Two Proposals from the Combined Evidence of Climatology and Linguistic History — Grain Harvesting Beginning in the Horn of Africa as a Re…

20,000–16,000 BCE: (Two Proposals from the Combined Evidence of Climatology and Linguistic History — Grain Harvesting Beginning in the Horn of Africa as a Response to the Last Glacial Maximum, and the Earliest Afrasian Speakers Being Practitioners of This Grain-Harvesting Subsistence Living in the Horn of Africa Probably in the More Northerly Areas Where Grassland Expansion Would Have Been Greatest): The combined evidence of climatology and the linguistic historical findings raises two proposals of foundational importance for the deep history of the Afrasian peoples and, by extension, of ancient Egypt. The first is that grain harvesting began in the Horn of Africa as a direct response to the Last Glacial Maximum — the period of peak aridity and cold that transformed the region’s ecology, shrinking forests and vastly expanding the grasslands of the Ethiopian Highlands. The second is that the earliest Afrasian speakers were practitioners of precisely this kind of subsistence, and that they lived in the Horn of Africa, probably in the more northerly areas where grassland expansion would have been greatest. These are not speculative leaps. They are the convergent conclusions of two independent lines of evidence — climate science and comparative linguistics — each pointing to the same place and the same period. The proto-Afrasian people harvested wild grains in the northern Ethiopian Highlands during or shortly after the Glacial Maximum, and the language they spoke while doing so would eventually become the ancestor of every Afrasian tongue from Omotic to Arabic. The civilization of the pharaohs begins not with the unification of the Two Lands but with a gathering of wild grain on a highland plateau, twenty thousand years earlier, by a people whose very name has been lost but whose linguistic descendants would reshape the ancient world.