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IN THEIR REVIEW "FARMERS AND THEIR languages: the first expansions" (25 Apr. 2003, p. 597), J. Diamond and P. Bellwood suggest that food production and the Afroasiatic language family were brought simultaneously from the Near East to Africa by demic diffusion, in other words, by a migration of food-producing peoples. In resurrecting this generally abandoned view, the authors misrepresent the views of the late I. M. Diakonoff (1), rely on linguistic reconstructions inapplicable to their claims (2), and fail to engage the five decades of Afroasiatic scholarship that rebutted this idea in the first place. This extensive, well-grounded linguistic research places the Afroasiatic homeland in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa (3-8) and, when all of Afroasiatic's branches are included, strongly indicates a pre-food-producing proto-Afroasiatic economy (1, 7, 8).
A careful reading of Diakonoff (1) shows his continuing adherence to his long-held position of an exclusively African origin (4, 5) for the family. He explicitly describes proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary as consistent with non-food-producing vocabulary and links it to pre-Neolithic cultures in the Levant and in Africa south of Egypt, noting the latter to be older. Diakonoff does revise his location for the Common Semitic homeland, moving it from entirely within northeast Africa to areas straddling the Nile Delta and Sinai, but continues to place the origins of the five other branches of the Afroasiatic language family wholly in Africa (1). One interpretation of the archaeological data supports a pre-food-producing population movement from Africa into the Levant (9), consistent with the linguistic arguments for a pre-Neolithic migration of pre-proto-Semitic speakers out of Africa via Sinai (8).
The proto-language of each Afroasiatic branch developed its own distinct vocabulary of food production, further supporting the view that herding and cultivation emerged separately in each branch after the proto-Afroasiatic period (7, 8). Diamond and Bellwood adopt Militarev's (2) solitary counterclaim of proto-Afroasiatic cultivation. However, not one of Militarev's proposed 32 agricultural roots can be considered diagnostic of cultivation. Fifteen are reconstructed as names of plants or loose categories of plants. Such evidence may reveal plants known to early Afroasiatic speakers, but it does not indicate whether they were cultivated or wild. Militarev's remaining roots are each semantically mixed, i.e., they have food-production-related meanings in some languages, but in...