9700–5500 BCE: (Language Families as Historical Archives — For the Linguistically Trained Historian the Complexes of Word Histories Across Descendant Languag…

9700–5500 BCE: (Language Families as Historical Archives — For the Linguistically Trained Historian the Complexes of Word Histories Across Descendant Languages Serving as Historical Registers and Powerful Resources for Recovering Longue Durée Social and Cultural Histories, Two African Examples Being the Niger-Congo Family Whose Expansion Began with Advances in Wild-Grain Collection and Then Cultivation, and the Nilo-Saharan Family Whose Expansion Began with Elaborated Aquatic Resource Use and Then Herding and Cultivation, a Third African Invention of Agriculture Among the Omotic-Speaking Peoples of Southwestern Ethiopia Taking Shape in the Seventh and Sixth Millennia with Enset-Based Farming Spreading Across the Southern Ethiopian Highlands): For the linguistically trained historian, the complexes of word histories across descendant languages serve as historical registers and powerful resources for recovering and depicting the longue durée social and cultural histories of their speakers. Two of the great African language families illustrate this process directly. The Niger-Congo family’s expansion began with subsistence changes dating to the first four millennia of the Holocene epoch — with population expansions supported at first by advances in foraging productivity through wild-grain collection, and then by the gradual shift to cultivation. The Nilo-Saharan family’s expansion similarly began with greatly elaborated aquatic resource use and then by the shift to both herding and cultivation, alongside their Cushitic-speaking neighbors. A third African invention of agriculture, among the Omotic-speaking peoples in far southwestern Ethiopia, began to take shape by probably around the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, with Omotic societies over the next three millennia spreading their enset-based farming across the breadth of the southern Ethiopian Highlands and into north-central parts of the highlands as well. Three language families, three independent agricultural traditions, three separate demographic explosions — all African, all driven by the same fundamental dynamic of food production enabling population growth and territorial expansion. The Niger-Congo family, which today includes the Bantu languages spoken across a third of the continent, began with women collecting wild fonio in West Africa. The Nilo-Saharan family, whose speakers built Nabta Playa and ruled at Qustul, began with fishermen on the Nile and cattle herders in the eastern Sahara. The Omotic family, nestled in the Ethiopian Highlands, began with the cultivation of enset — the false banana — a crop so uniquely Ethiopian that most of the world has never heard of it. Each family is a monument to African creativity, each expansion a testament to the demographic power of food production, and each linguistic archive a library of cultural history that the written record cannot touch.