Before 15,000 BCE: (Reconstructed Vocabularies as a Cultural Archive — Words at Each Node of the Afrasian Family Tree Telling Us What Those Ancient Peoples P…

Before 15,000 BCE: (Reconstructed Vocabularies as a Cultural Archive — Words at Each Node of the Afrasian Family Tree Telling Us What Those Ancient Peoples Possessed, Practiced, Knew, and Believed, the Reconstruction of Whole Suites of Words Relating to Material Culture Allowing Correlation with Datable Archaeology, and the Proto-Afrasian People Revealed as Harvesters of Wild Grains with This Economic Focus Continuing Through All Successive Early Nodes of the Family Tree): One particularly powerful set of resources allows us to propose correlations of linguistic history with datable archaeology: the reconstructed vocabularies of material culture at each of the nodes on the Afrasian family tree. The words used in those ancient languages serve as a robust cultural archive. They tell us what the people who spoke those languages possessed, practiced, knew, and believed. If speakers of an ancient language had words for a particular thing or activity, then at the very least they knew about it. If we can reconstruct whole suites of words relating to particular cultural objects and activities, we know that these were lively parts of their cultures. And if the cultural suites relate to material culture, we can search the archaeological record for the times and places where those particular clusters of material features occur. The proto-Afrasian people, it turns out, were harvesters of wild grains. This economic focus continued right down through all the successive early nodes on the family tree. From at least the proto-Erythraic period, they cooked their grains in the form of flat breads. The vocabulary is extensive: words for grain in general, for specific grain species, for flour, for grindstones, for separating grain from chaff, for cooked grain, for flat bread — an entire lexicon of grain processing reconstructable at the deepest levels of the family. These are not isolated words. They are a system, a vocabulary of subsistence that only a people deeply committed to grain harvesting would have needed to develop.