Expectancy For The Morphological Form Of Verbs During Semantic: Fill & Download for Free

The Natural Language Processing models or NLP models are a separate segment which deals with instructed data.The following is a list of some of the most commonly researched tasks in NLP. Note that some of these tasks have direct real-world applications, while others more commonly serve as subtasks that are used to aid in solving larger tasks. What distinguishes these tasks from other potential and actual NLP tasks is not only the volume of research devoted to them but the fact that for each one there is typically a well-defined problem setting, a standard metric for evaluating the task, standard corpora on which the task can be evaluated, and competitions devoted to the specific task.Automatic summarizationProduce a readable summary of a chunk of text. Often used to provide summaries of text of a known type, such as articles in the financial section of a newspaper.Coreference resolutionGiven a sentence or larger chunk of text, determine which words ("mentions") refer to the same objects ("entities"). Anaphora resolution is a specific example of this task, and is specifically concerned with matching up pronouns with the nouns or names that they refer to. The more general task of coreference resolution also includes identifying so-called "bridging relationships" involving referring expressions. For example, in a sentence such as "He entered John's house through the front door", "the front door" is a referring expression and the bridging relationship to be identified is the fact that the door being referred to is the front door of John's house (rather than of some other structure that might also be referred to).Discourse analysisThis rubric includes a number of related tasks. One task is identifying the discourse structure of connected text, i.e. the nature of the discourse relationships between sentences (e.g. elaboration, explanation, contrast). Another possible task is recognizing and classifying the speech acts in a chunk of text (e.g. yes-no question, content question, statement, assertion, etc.).Machine translationAutomatically translate text from one human language to another. This is one of the most difficult problems, and is a member of a class of problems colloquially termed "AI-complete", i.e. requiring all of the different types of knowledge that humans possess (grammar, semantics, facts about the real world, etc.) in order to solve properly.Morphological segmentationSeparate words into individual morphemes and identify the class of the morphemes. The difficulty of this task depends greatly on the complexity of the morphology (i.e. the structure of words) of the language being considered. English has fairly simple morphology, especially inflectional morphology, and thus it is often possible to ignore this task entirely and simply model all possible forms of a word (e.g. "open, opens, opened, opening") as separate words. In languages such as Turkish or Manipuri,[6] a highly agglutinated Indian language, however, such an approach is not possible, as each dictionary entry has thousands of possible word forms.Named entity recognition (NER)Given a stream of text, determine which items in the text map to proper names, such as people or places, and what the type of each such name is (e.g. person, location, organization). Note that, although capitalization can aid in recognizing named entities in languages such as English, this information cannot aid in determining the type of named entity, and in any case is often inaccurate or insufficient. For example, the first word of a sentence is also capitalized, and named entities often span several words, only some of which are capitalized. Furthermore, many other languages in non-Western scripts (e.g. Chinese or Arabic) do not have any capitalization at all, and even languages with capitalization may not consistently use it to distinguish names. For example, German capitalizes all nouns, regardless of whether they refer to names, and French and Spanish do not capitalize names that serve as adjectives.Natural language generationConvert information from computer databases into readable human language.Natural language understandingConvert chunks of text into more formal representations such as first-order logic structures that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. Natural language understanding involves the identification of the intended semantic from the multiple possible semantics which can be derived from a natural language expression which usually takes the form of organized notations of natural languages concepts. Introduction and creation of language metamodel and ontology are efficient however empirical solutions. An explicit formalization of natural languages semantics without confusions with implicit assumptions such as closed-world assumption (CWA) vs. open-world assumption, or subjective Yes/No vs. objective True/False is expected for the construction of a basis of semantics formalization.[7]Optical character recognition (OCR)Given an image representing printed text, determine the corresponding text.Part-of-speech taggingGiven a sentence, determine the part of speech for each word. Many words, especially common ones, can serve as multiple parts of speech. For example, "book" can be a noun ("the book on the table") or verb ("to book a flight"); "set" can be a noun, verb or adjective; and "out" can be any of at least five different parts of speech. Some languages have more such ambiguity than others. Languages with little inflectional morphology, such as English are particularly prone to such ambiguity. Chinese is prone to such ambiguity because it is a tonal language during verbalization. Such inflection is not readily conveyed via the entities employed within the orthography to convey intended meaning.ParsingDetermine the parse tree (grammatical analysis) of a given sentence. The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous and typical sentences have multiple possible analyses. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, for a typical sentence there may be thousands of potential parses (most of which will seem completely nonsensical to a human).Question answeringGiven a human-language question, determine its answer. Typical questions have a specific right answer (such as "What is the capital of Canada?"), but sometimes open-ended questions are also considered (such as "What is the meaning of life?"). Recent works have looked at even more complex questions.[8]Relationship extractionGiven a chunk of text, identify the relationships among named entities (e.g. who is married to whom).Sentence breaking (also known as sentence boundary disambiguation)Given a chunk of text, find the sentence boundaries. Sentence boundaries are often marked by periods or other punctuation marks, but these same characters can serve other purposes (e.g. marking abbreviations).Sentiment analysisExtract subjective information usually from a set of documents, often using online reviews to determine "polarity" about specific objects. It is especially useful for identifying trends of public opinion in the social media, for the purpose of marketing.Speech recognitionGiven a sound clip of a person or people speaking, determine the textual representation of the speech. This is the opposite of text to speech and is one of the extremely difficult problems colloquially termed "AI-complete" (see above). In natural speech there are hardly any pauses between successive words, and thus speech segmentation is a necessary subtask of speech recognition (see below). Note also that in most spoken languages, the sounds representing successive letters blend into each other in a process termed coarticulation, so the conversion of the analog signal to discrete characters can be a very difficult process.Speech segmentationGiven a sound clip of a person or people speaking, separate it into words. A subtask of speech recognition and typically grouped with it.Topic segmentation and recognitionGiven a chunk of text, separate it into segments each of which is devoted to a topic, and identify the topic of the segment.Word segmentationSeparate a chunk of continuous text into separate words. For a language like English, this is fairly trivial, since words are usually separated by spaces. However, some written languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not mark word boundaries in such a fashion, and in those languages text segmentation is a significant task requiring knowledge of the vocabulary and morphology of words in the language.Word sense disambiguationMany words have more than one meaning; we have to select the meaning which makes the most sense in context. For this problem, we are typically given a list of words and associated word senses, e.g. from a dictionary or from an online resource such as WordNet.In some cases, sets of related tasks are grouped into subfields of NLP that are often considered separately from NLP as a whole. Examples include:Information retrieval (IR)This is concerned with storing, searching and retrieving information. It is a separate field within computer science (closer to databases), but IR relies on some NLP methods (for example, stemming). Some current research and applications seek to bridge the gap between IR and NLP.Information extraction (IE)This is concerned in general with the extraction of semantic information from text. This covers tasks such as named entity recognition, Coreference resolution, relationship extraction, etc.Speech processingThis covers speech recognition, text-to-speech and related tasks.Other tasks include:Native-language identificationStemmingText simplificationText-to-speechText-proofingNatural language searchQuery expansionAutomated essay scoringTruecasingReference: Natural language processing

Thanks for the A2a! A Pakistani perspective:Yes. Which language is used, how it’s used and which gender uses it as well as the very linguistic structure of the language CAN weigh heavily upon gender archetypes in a society. The answer is a short overview of some of the ways language defines gender or is linked to gender attributes but it will conclude with a view of the opposing side as well: How language has little to no impact on gender archetypes.In Pakistan, we have the official, state sanctioned languages of Urdu and English propogated by the center. Urdu holds the status of our common, state backed language due to it’s link with the national ideology that gave birth to our nation. English is the language of state business, a colonial inheritance, and finds itself in use due to the trappings of its power.The state backing and state support of Urdu at the cost of regional languages has not gone over as smoothly as was once imagined. More often than not, this regional and local frustration with the dominance of a central, state language manifests itself in media and literature through the symbol of the ‘virile, macho and masculine rebel’ who is the embodiment of this local, regional language that rebels against the center.A short extract on how this plays out between regional, local Punjabi vs the central, state supported Urdu:Outside of politics, are our media and culture which also reflect this unrecognized frustration in Punjab with the lack of recognition for a Punjabi centric identity and the Punjabi language.The Foot-Worshipper’s Guide to Watching Maula JattThe Ghandasa film genre of Punjabi film cinema, which rose to prominence in the 1980s, has always portrayed the hero as the Ghadasa wielding rebel against authority. Some of the most magnetic written literature and media portrayals have shown the virile, macho Punjabi man standing up as a fierce rebel against some distant central power whether it was the Mughal emperor Akbar in Delhi (Dulla Bhatti) or whatever foreign power that was subjugating Punjab at the time.This kind of ties into point #3 that i talked about. Punjabi here is more direct and aggressive sounding partly because of class differences but also because there is a strong cultural ethos in the Pakistani Punjab which rebels against the decrepit status assigned to Punjabi in Pakistani. It seeks a re-invigoration of Punjabi identity as masculine, independent and warrior-like away from subjugated feeling it has now. As such, Punjabi literature and cinema in Pakistan relishes and doubles down on Punjabi’s volatility. Violence, sex, intoxication and spiritual rapture are embraced as critical elements of the Punjabi identity as it struggles to project itself and be recognized. It’s a counter-reaction to it’s assigned low status in Pakistan.The 1980s Ghandassa movies were also iconic when they first rose to prominence in the 80s because they were themselves an act of rebellion against the gentle, clean shaven, well mannered, soft spoken Urdu male actor ideal our cinema had portrayed up till then.You can somewhat detect the gender-specific undertones here as well. Of Urdu being considered as ‘feminine’ in it’s linguistic traits when juxtaposed with the more pungent, ‘pugnacious’ nature of the Punjabi language. This plays into the gender dynamics of our society as well with women who speak Punjabi being viewed in a fairly different light than women who speak Urdu.Usama Ahmad's answer to Are Pakistani Punjabi dialects sweeter than Indian Punjabi dialects?This plants the seed of the local, regionalized varients of the language which rebel against the central language to attain masculine traits.Suddenly all the bad boys in school speak the local, rationalized, suppressed dialects and languages when they fight and break the rules.The central, state sanctioned language is now viewed in an effeminate light, for the women or the ‘well behaved, passive, subservient’ men.Ofcourse, this all lies beneath the layer of our own gender attribution of certain acts with certain genders.Obedience, passivity and timidity are encouraged as feminine traits. Rebelliousness, violence, strength are encouraged as masculine traits.The regional vs central language dilemma simply manifests this division of traits into masculine and feminine.And then comes the issue of “class”.State sanctioned and supported languages attain upper class elements. They come with a ton of state power, economic wealth and importance imbibed.This puts them at a massive advantage vis a vis the regional, local dialects that must fend for their own or have reduced economic and state power attributed with them.In Pakistan this has resulted in local, regional languages like Punjabi being relegated to the rural areas or the lower-middle income classes in urban areas. The state sanctioned languages of Urdu and English, which wield true economic power and avenues of advancement are the domain of the urban, educated, upper-middle class elites.The impact this has on gender is noticeable.In Pakistani social media on Facebook, there is a meme floating that basically goes like this:>You see a beautiful girl in fashionable clothes>You immediately hope to befriend her or hit on her>The moment she opens her mouth, her thick Punjabi accent or her speaking of the Punjabi language serves as a punchline>The man recoils from her Punjabi as it is an undesirable quality to find in womenThis is indicative of a general trend in Pakistan where women speaking localized, regional languages are derided as low class, backwards and lacking ideal feminine characteristics.Women are expected to strictly conform to the state sanctioned, central languages of ‘Proper’ Urdu and English. Failing which they face a degrading in social standing.Of course, this applies to men as well but due to the patriarchal nature of our society, men have some leeway in this regard. Women however do not.The last point i’d like to go over is how the structure of the language itself impacts how much feminine attributes or gender equality find a space in society itself.Some time ago, CASE (a university in Pakistan) did a profile of the different cultural dynamics in Pakistan Province-by-Province wise.Using the Hofstede Framework for Cultural Differences, they analyzed each province by the following cultural traits:Power Distance Index (high versus low).Individualism Versus Collectivism.Masculinity Versus Femininity.Uncertainty Avoidance Index (high versus low).Pragmatic Versus Normative.Indulgence Versus Restraint.Let me draw your attention to #3, the Masculinity Vs Femininity index whose results are reproduced below:Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260259174_Cultural_Diversity_in_Pakistan_National_vs_ProvincialNote how the lowest Masculinity index is assigned to Baluchistan which means that more feminine attributes find acceptance in public society in the province compared to strictly masculine attributes. As defined by the designers of the tools themselves:Femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.In the business context Masculinity versus Femininity is sometimes also related to as “tough versus tender” cultures.National Culture - Hofstede InsightsBut why Baluchistan? One would think that the economically developed and somewhat liberal province of Punjab would do better in this regard. Baluchistan is frequently derided as a backwards province by the rest of the country. To find such a level of public acceptance of feminine attributes in the province must seem anomalous at least.But if you look at it through the lens of linguistics, it makes perfect sense.Balochistan as a province speaks 3 primary languages. Balochi, Pashto and Brauhi.Balochi is a direct descendant of the Iranic languages that have existed in this land for centuries which is of course perfectly sensible given Balochistan exists on the border with Iran. The second language is Brauhi which is a Dravidian language that has been extensively Persianized.Both Persian and Dravidian have a far less reduced emphasis on gendered terms compared to other languages in the region. Persian for example is considered a gender neutral language.Dravidian languages are a bit more complicated and are decidedly less gender neutral but elements of gender neutrality remain:Dravidian languages have a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free. It is commonly used to address also, people of higher status, age or stature.Gender neutrality in genderless languages - WikipediaA more authentic source:We conclude our world tour of pronominal gender languages with the Dravidian language Malayalam. From the description by Asher and Kumari 1997, it is clear that gender agreement is practically restricted to pronouns. ‘‘The justification of noun classes [...] depends neither on morphological features [...], nor on features of concord within a noun phrase. Nor is concord with verbs relevant [...]. Gender does determine some aspects of grammar, however, and these have to do with a sort of concord. Firstly, the choice of pronoun among avan, avai and at« is determined by whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter.’’ (Asher and Kumari 1997, p. 252).8 Thus, the Malayalam personal pronouns agree in gender. The three forms are distributed according to semantic criteria. ‘‘Masculine nouns denote male human beings, feminine nouns denote female human beings, and neuter nouns nonhumans. Gods and demons are grouped with humans. Infants fall into the neuter class’’ (Asher and Kumari 1997, p. 252). In the plural, masculine and feminine are merged into a human class.-Gender assignment and gender agreement: Evidence from pronominal gender languages, Jenny AudringGender assignment and gender agreement: Evidence from pronominal gender languagesThis seems to point to the fact that due to the rooting of Baloch languages in language trees that place less emphasis on gender dichotomies and are somewhat gender neutral, feminine traits in society find more outwards expression.I should put forward a point for consideration though: What we define as feminine traits in our culture and their outwards expression may not be a good barometer for women’s rights and gender equality.It’s considered OK in terms of masculinity in Pakthun societies for e.g. for men to put flowers in their clothes and hair and to hold hands. Which we consider feminine attributes. This does not however translate into a gender equal society or a society where women are empowered since Pakhtun and Baloch societies actually very conservative for women. It just shows how different cultures define masculine and feminine traits. Outwards expression of feminine traits in one society may actually be masculine traits in that society.Let’s go back to Hofstede’s tool that we discussed earlier and how it defined femininity:Femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.In the business context Masculinity versus Femininity is sometimes also related to as “tough versus tender” cultures.National Culture - Hofstede InsightsCooperation in the form of Jirgas or Tribal councils comprised excursively of all men, modesty in the form of forced veiling and an orientation towards consensus at the cost of individual rights flip the tables on Hofstede when we analyze Pakistan’s Western societies and cultures where his ‘feminine’ traits are the domain of men.Before ending, let’s take a detour towards the Persian language and the interesting case of how the Persian language’s gender neutral pronouns have a more complex layering than simple : ‘Persian is a feminist language’ conclusions.I’m going to borrow heavily from Farideh Dayanim Goldin’s paper: “Overcoming Gender: The Impact of the Persian Language on Iranian Women ’s Confessional Literature” for this section. An absolutely brilliant piece, the entire paper is a must read and goes into detail about how Persian was shaped not only by feminist struggles but also how it changed under authoritarian regimes and so on.She clearly instructs us in the opening passages about the core question under discussion here about how language impacts views on gender:The idea that language embodies patriarchal thought processes, severing women writers from the written language and from their own words, was first elaborated by the French feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray argues, for example, that language generally denies women a distinct subjectivity, with the result that the voice of women has largely been excluded from mainstream cultural discourse (Donovan). In this chapter, I juxtapose this theory to the obstacles faced by Iranian women writers of life narratives. Is it possible that Persian could have impeded Iranian women’s literary aspirations, especially in the genre of life narratives? Conscious of the limitations of examining Iranian culture through a Western cultural gaze, I do not depend on Western theorists alone. Instead, I analyze the roots of the language as much as possible.Many feminist critics argue that language is structured according to patriarchal thought processes, resulting in the silencing of women and the locking away of their inner thoughts. In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly blames men for stealing the language and urges women to reclaim its power (8–11). Irigaray and Cixous consider language to be phallocentric, excluding and repressing women (see Tong 217–33). Cixous writes:“I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.” (875)The hypothesis that language affects thoughts and social behaviour is reflected in numerous feminist novels that attempt to overcome the phallocentric bias of language.Source: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=english_fac_pubsShe then takes on the issue of Persian and it’s gender neutral structure:“ Indeed, one might think that Persian would be an ideal feminist language. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, as well as to Arabic, a Semitic language from which it has borrowed extensively, Persian is grammatically gender-neutral. There is no generic he in Persian: the pronoun u is gender-neutral, referring to both he and she. However, the gender-neutral grammar of Persian does not mean that the language is devoid of gender bias.”Source: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=english_fac_pubsShe first takes on the most popular claim: That Persian society was largely friendly for women thanks to Persian’s gender neutral structure and it’s corruption into a patriarchal form took place due to the Arab invasions and the incorporation of Arab vocabulary into Persian:The principle of linguistic relativity, more commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, proposes that “the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one thinks and behaves” (Kramsch 11).1 If we accept this hypothesis, then gendered terminology that encodes derogatory assumptions about women actively reinforces patriarchal attitudes and power structures. On this basis, one might argue that, in the wake of the Muslim conquest of Persian in the mid-seventh century, the absorption into Persian of gender-specific features of Arabic served to encourage a bias against women in Persian culture.According to Farideh Tehrani, in the years following the conquest, the mullahs (Muslim religious leaders) supported the change of script from Persian to Arabic in hopes that it would facilitate the learning of Arabic and hence the study of the Quran (20). With this change of script, Arabic words and word-formation processes entered Persian, with the usual consequences: some Persian vocabulary was lost, and new words entered the language via Arabic. Especially in tandem with conversion to Islam, these linguistic changes may have influenced Iranians to alter their thought processes to resemble those of their Arab conquerors, including ideas concerning women.In “Arabic Influences on Persian Literature,” de Bruijn writes, “Classical Persian literature was born in an environment dominated by Arabic culture” (369) and proposes the term literary bilingualism to describe the relationship of Arabic and Persian (384). In other words, it is sometimes possible to express a single idea through two different words, one Persian, the other Arabic, with each word tied to its own linguistic roots and connotations. Writing in 1946, William Haas estimated that “about 50 percent of the Persian language consists of Arabic words” (186). According to John Perry, roughly 25 percent of Persian vocabulary—half of these borrowed words—have only a feminine form (270), a good example being bakereh, female virgin. Although the masculine version (baker) exists in Arabic, it has not entered the Persian vocabulary. It is also significant that, in their feminine form, many borrowed Arabic words have negative connotations. Za’ifeh has been an especially damaging word for Iranian women. In its masculine form, the Arabic word za’if means “weak,” as in being weak from an illness. Although the word has been adopted in both forms in Persian, the masculine form does not have a strong negative connotation. In fact, to be used as a negative word, za’if needs the help of another adjective: for example, “he is za’if and bi-eradeh” means that he is weak and lacks willpower. However, when the Arabic suffix -eh is added, thereby creating the feminine form, the meaning of the word changes drastically. Za’ifeh (the weaker one) means a female slave or wife in Arabic. In Persian, the word is often used to demean one’s wife and to emphasize her lower status in society.While such words arguably imported a negative view of women to Iran, other Arabic words convey religious morality. Numerous borrowed Arabic words carry moral assumptions and are associated with women: for example, esmat (purity) and effat (chastity) are often used as female names. With the negating prefix bi-, as in bi-esmat and bi-effat (impure and unchaste), these words develop into linguistic tools that work to enforce moral codes. A relatively new loanword that has been added to this collection is hejab, meaning a woman’s head covering. Wearing the hejab became mandatory when the Islamic government gained power in Iran in 1979. The word has come to connote more than a piece of clothing, however: it symbolizes women’s chastity and moral purity. Again, word bi-hejab does not simply represent a woman without a head covering; rather, it signifies a woman who lacks moral values, since she has dared to display her hair. When used in reference to men, the same concept is considered an insult. A traveller to Shiraz during the Iran-Iraq war reported seeing a banner hung by the gates of the city on which were the words Be shahr-e lachak be-sar-ha khosh amadid (“Welcome to the city whose people cover their hair”), meaning a city whose inhabitants are all women, that is, a city of cowards (Dayanim 1980). This deliberate insult was used to provoke the Shirazi men into action, since they had not volunteered in great numbers for the war with Iraq.…..Borrowings from Arabic also reflect the expectation that women belong within domestic (rather than public) space and that they should be silent and submissive. For example, a woman who is khyaban-gard (who roams the streets) or harjaii (who has known many places) is a prostitute. Women are not to speak too much: a noisy and chaotic room is compared to hamam-e zananeh, a communal bath for women, a place where women traditionally socialized and gossiped. A zan-e zaban deraz, a woman with a long tongue, is a woman who cannot stop talking and is therefore to be avoided. When a woman answers back, rather than remaining quiet and docile, she is a patiareh, a shrew, an argumentative woman. A woman who dares to observe, who does not look down, is a chashm darideh, a woman with “torn eyes,” the result of her habit of opening them too often or too wide. In addition, women need to be kept under control………Given that Arabic is linguistically unrelated to Persian, it is often very difficult for Iranians to pronounce Arabic words. As a result, formal Persian, which is used in literature and in writing generally, contains a great many more Arabic words than does the spoken language. Moreover, as David Crystal points out, “One of the most important functions of language variations is to enable individuals to identify with a social group or to separate themselves from it” (42). As Iranians writers came under pressure to include Arabic words as a mark of literary sophistication and to accept Islamic values as standard codes of morality, not only did literary Persian diverge from the spoken language, but men came to rule the realm of literature, while women remained silent behind culturally imposed walls.Source: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=english_fac_pubsBut then she carefully de-constructs this claim with an opposing viewpoint: Persian society was already gender-discriminatory. The Arab vocabulary may have been willingly imported to further establish patriarchal attitudes which already existed and the suggestion that the Arabic invasions changed Persian attitudes towards women does not hold as much water as suggested.Considered within the context of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the above examples might suggest that the insertion of Arabic words into Persian led to a change of linguistic patterns, which, in turn, encouraged patriarchal values.(The so-called strong version of this hypothesis (the claim that the language we speak actually determines our thought processes) is now generally considered untenable: it is not that the scope of our thought is delimited by the language we speak or that it is impossible to express certain ideas in certain languages. However, a language’s lexicon and grammatical structures facilitate the expression of certain concepts and relationships while complicating the expression of others. As Kramsch explains, “The way a given language encodes experience semantically makes aspects of that experience not exclusively accessible, but just more salient for the users of that language” (13).)However, other theorists disagree with the theory that Islamic culture was responsible for the introduction of a bias against women into Persian culture. Mohamad TavakoliTarghi asserts that many scholars have wrongly promoted pre-Islamic Iran as “a lost Utopia,” in part by arguing that “the veiling of women and polygamy were non-Iranian customs promulgated by the Arabs after the conquest of Iran.” As he goes on to say, “These ‘historical facts’ were used rhetorically . . . in order to project Iran’s ‘decadence’ on to Arabs and Islam and introject the desirable attributes of Europeans on the pre-Islamic Self” (175). Referring to the last Iranian empire before the rise of Islam, Mary Boyce lends support to this criticism, noting that “[d] espite Zoroastrian teachings about spiritual equality, in Sasanian law women were indeed held to belong to their nearest male relatives—father, husband, brother or son” (130).Moreover, as Herbert Clark and Eve Clark observe, “when people lack a word for a useful concept, they soon find one” (265). Therefore, it is also possible that Iranians simply adopted foreign words in ways that accorded with existing attitudes. Such beliefs are evident in the word arusi (wedding), a derivative of the Arabic word arus (bride): the implication here is that marriage is an Iranian woman’s raison d’être. More telling of the traditional patriarchal attitude toward Iranian women is the word arusak. The addition of the diminutive suffix -ak at the end of arus changes the meaning from “a bride” to “a small bride,” an inanimate object, a doll, something to play with. Traditionally, Iranian men preferred their brides as young as nine years old, malleable children who would easily conform to life in their in-laws’ homes. In fact, one of the first amendments to the legal system after the Islamic Revolution reinstated the marriage age for women at nine. This preference for young girls often brought female family members together before weddings for the custom of bandandazi: removing the bride’s body hair, including the pubic hair, which signifies a woman’s maturity. The custom of early marriages was so common that satirists like ’Ali Akbar Saber (1862–1911) criticized “chauvinist men,” whom he held “responsible for the degraded state in which women find themselves,” as Hasan Javadi notes (211).….There are yet other words in Persian that imply a difference in status between men and women. For example, whereas the word zan (woman) is, at best, neutral, the word mard (man) connotes many positive qualities. To be a mard is to be strong, generous, humane, and capable; na-mard (not to be a man) is therefore to be inhuman or a coward. Moreover, the word mard has been used to compensate for the lack of a gender-specific pronoun. Ferdowsi, the famous Iranian epic poet of the tenth century, employs the term in a generic sense in a famous poem often used by Iranians as a proverb:Zeniru bovad mard ra rasti ze sosti dorugh ayad o kastiStrength brings man truthfulness, while falsehood creates weakness. (Haim 250)The choice of the word mard betrays patriarchal habits of thought: women are denied the attributes of strength and truthfulness. It seems ironic that Ferdowsi would use a masculine word in this way, given that in composing his great Persian national epic, Shahnameh, he strove to cleanse the language of Arabic words.…..On the basis of the evidence that has come down to us, it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions about the origin of patriarchal attitudes in Persian culture. Although it may be that contact with Arabic enabled and encouraged the expression of such attitudes, it is also quite likely that these attitudes were present in the culture, at least to some degree, prior to the Arab conquest. One way or another, though, despite its gender-neutral grammar, Persian is today replete with words, phrases, and proverbial sayings that reflect and reinforce patriarchal values. Whether borrowed or constructed as compound words and phrases, these features of Persian serve either to discriminate against women or simply to exclude them. As part of the foundation of a culture and its thought processes, patriarchal language has the power to kill women’s creative thoughts and words.Source: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=english_fac_pubsWith this, i’d conclude the already pretty long answer. And with an open ended conclusion as well.The answer presents multiple cases where language and gender are closely entwined and how gender attributes and our view of gender is shaped by language. As well as cases where the vice versa is true.But there are also quite a lot of problematic assumptions and loop wholes in this view which is why i incorporated Ms. Farideh’s brilliant paper at the end here. To show that there are cases where you can have pretty gender neutral language but still have discriminatory attitudes on gender. An obvious case of language choice having no change in perception on gender archetypes at all.So it’s quite up in the air really.If you ask me, i have seen plenty of Male Feminists coopt the language women use to rally and organize Feminist marches and movements like #MeToo only to infiltrate their circles to harass and intimidate women. Choice of language does little to change their thinking about their female counterparts.And yet, there are cases where language truly does shape our view of gender and gender attributes in more ways than one.I leave it for you to decide what conclusion seems stronger to you in this grey area, based on all the data provided here.

If going only by genetic information, then the current evidence would point toward the original speakers being primarily Natufian-like. That ancestral component (often in the form of Neolithic Levantine ancestry, which is itself greatly intermixed with Anatolian ancestry) is present at high percentages in Cushitic peoples, Egyptians, Semitic speakers, and, to a considerably lesser extent, Berber speakers and Omotic speakers. Chadic speakers are very different in that they have next to none of this ancestry, with only one new genetic study suggesting [tangentially] that Chadic speakers may have a very tiny amount of this ancestry, which other West Africans may share as well. However, considering that most Afro-Asiatic speakers have this ancestry, the genetic information would indeed be in favor of the original speakers being Natufian-like.That premise is strengthened by information gleaned from presumed earlier Afro-Asiatic speakers from East Africa. For instance, individuals from the Pastoral Neolithic culture of Kenya had about 50% [fairly pristinely] Natufian-like ancestry, thus constituting the largest share of their ancestry, with the remainder of their ancestry being split between Sudanese-like ancestry (peaking in modern Nilotic speakers, such as the Dinka) and ancestry related to a 4,500-year-old individual from Mota Cave in Ethiopia (peaking in modern Omotic speakers and the Hadza). [1]If removing the Mota-like ancestry from these individuals, which was the only ancestral component solidly native to the Horn of Africa region (the other two are intrusive), one is left with only Natufian-like and Sudanese-like ancestry. This also suggests that the original Cushitic speakers were 65% - 70% Natufian-like and 30% – 35% Sudanese-like ancestrally. Additionally, the majority of the Y-DNA lineages of the Pastoral Neolithic individuals were E1b1b1b2b-CTS10880, which is a sub-lineage of haplogroup E1b1b1b2-Z830 (aka E-Z830), which was found in the majority of both Natufians (E-Z830* to be specific, which has left no descendants today) and Neolithic Levantine ancient samples (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB)) identified so far. [2]Another pastoralist individual (this time, a woman from Luxmanda, Tanzania from 3,100 years ago) had roughly the same ancestral components as the Pastoral Neolithic individuals, but had ancestry more closely resembling PPNB individuals rather than Natufian-like. Additionally, the woman’s PPNB-related ancestry stands at ~38%. [3] Now, while the genetic information would strongly suggest the original speakers were Levantine-like in some way, the linguistic information is somewhat at variance with that conclusion.For example, as of yet, Proto-Afro-Asiatic doesn’t appear to have been a language of agriculturalists or pastoralists, as the lexical information does not suggest that a shared corpus of words diagnostic of agriculture or pastoralism are shared between the constituent branches of Afro-Asiatic. As far as can be told, the original speakers intensively harvested wild grasses and grains, but there’s little to no indication of intentional systematic cultivation of crops or animal-keeping from the available corpus. Since Neolithic Levantine ancestry is also seen throughout the Afro-Asiatic realm on top of Natufian-like ancestry, one would expect to find shared agricultural lexica throughout the phylum, but that’s not the case at all. Below are two examples to highlight these phylum-wide differences:“To herd:”Proto-Cushitic: *galaal, *der-Proto-Berber: *eksProto-Semitic: *rˁy - (“herd, Hurd livestock, pasture”) ~ *mawl- ~ *mVly-at- ('herd', 'rich in cattle', ' booty', ' bride-prize')*rˁy, on the other hand, is quite possibly connected to Proto-East Chadic *ʔa-raw- “to chase,” thus increasing the likelihood that *rˁy experienced a semantic shift to suit pastoralism.Egyptian (Old): sꜣProto-Chadic: Unavailable due to low coverage.Proto-Omotic: Unavailable, as neither agriculture nor pastoralism are traceable to Proto-Omotic, Proto-North Omotic, or Proto-South Omotic (i.e., agriculture and pastoralism (livestock, too)) appear to postdate all three). [4]“Cultivated plot:”Proto-Cushitic: *paˀrProto-Berber (represented by Proto-Amazigh): *tigemmiNote: Proto-Amazigh is apparently ~ 500 years younger than Proto-Berber and is dated to ~1,000 BCE.Proto-Semitic: *ḥaraṯ- “to till, to plow” ~ *hugār — “arable land”A connection to “Proto-Berber” *HigVr (“arable land”) ~ Proto-Amazigh *iger “plowed field” is most likely specious, since this is now understood to be a loanword from Latin “ager ((“field, farm”), cognate of English “acre”).Egyptian: ꜣḥ.t (“field (“especially agricultural land”))Proto-Chadic: *wiy- ~ *mar- ~ *wal-An agricultural link to Proto-Semitic *mr (“hoe” (or digging stick)) isn’t straightforward and might not have implied agriculture originally. A likely cognate of both is Proto-South Cushitic *maraˀ- (“cave, burrow, den”), thus yielding the Proto-Afro-Asiatic root *mar, whose closest meaning is apparently “dig” or “digging of holes.” [5] There is also the Egyptian noun mr, [6] which meant “hoe (or digging stick).” [7] But one source states that it is likely a deverbative of the verb mr(r) (“to hoe, to dig a ditch”). This may be related to the forms above (via the meaning “dig”), or it may be derived from the Proto-Afro-Asiatic root *m-r, which means “river, channel.” [8] The word mar (“hoe, spade”) also exists in Sumerian, which may have loaned itself into Akkadian marru (“hoe, spade”). [9]Alternatively, this Egyptian word really could be a Wanderwort that ultimately stemmed from Sumerian. [10][11][12] However, the connection Sumerian mar to an earlier Semitic source (pre-Sargonic?) still appears to be sound, since there are related words for this in Ethiosemitic languages. [13]One should keep in mind that the ages of the proto-languages of each branch can differ significantly (e.g., Proto-Chadic ~ 7,000 years ago, Proto-Cushitic ~ 8,400 - 9,500 years ago, Proto-Semitic ~ 5,750 years ago, Proto-Berber ~ 3,500 years ago, etc.), [14] and semantic shifts can cause cognates to become somewhat obscured, but the available information, even with this caveat, still doesn’t point toward a common core suggesting a distinct familiarity with pastoralism or agriculture. The different branches did, however, spread with pastoralism, since livestock terminology is typically readily reconstructible for most branches, even though the terms don’t appear to be cognates across the branches.Even for Semitic, while Proto-Semitic certainly had agricultural terms, the linguistic information suggests that its immediate ancestor (Pre-Proto-Semitic) wasn’t a language of agriculturalists. Since unambiguous agriculture has been practiced in the Levant for about 12,000 years (albeit, originally alongside hunting and gathering), that reality, in conjunction with other linguistic information relative to other Western Asian phyla, actually suggests that Semitic’s lineage is somehow intrusive to the Levant rather than a lineage deeply rooted in the Levant ever since the emergence of agriculture there.Additionally, most of the Proto-Semitic agricultural terms don’t appear to have any wider cognates in Afro-Asiatic, and the few Proto-Semitic agricultural terms possibly inherited from an earlier Afro-Asiatic source usually show a non-agricultural connection to other Afro-Asiatic branches, thus suggesting that a great deal of Semitic’s agricultural terms were somehow borrowed from a pre-existing Neolithic Levantine people.If comparing Semitic’s agricultural (and pastoral) lexicon to that of Cushitic and then to that of Egyptian, which is itself more distantly related to Semitic than even Cushitic is, one sees virtually no overlap, especially if taking borrowings into account. In addition to that providing a robust corpus of unambiguous agricultural terms for Proto-Chadic and Proto-Cushitic is apparently not an easy task at the moment. As shown above, both do show some agricultural terms, but their corpora appear to be considerably smaller and more ambiguous than Proto-Semitic’s and Proto-Berber’s. Part of that, of course, is down to understudying of those branches on a deep level, but also the greater time depths of these respective branches. [15] This revelation, I believe, would then only point toward incipient agriculture for Proto-Chadic and Proto-Cushitic.Above: A 10,500-year-old basket very recently retrieved from the “Cave of Horror” in Negev Desert of Israel during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Levant. This remarkable and well-preserved find is the oldest such item ever found worldwide and apparently took two weavers to create. Note the size when compared to the man in the foreground of the previous photos. [16]Above: Full image of the basket. While the contents of it are still being identified, it’s estimated to be able to contain 90 liters of material. [17]Note: This basket also helps signify sedentism, as one sees the greater use of storage implements and facilities. Considering the amount this basket would have carried, its subsequent weight, and the amount of effort needed to make it, it helps point toward a society with some kind of familiarity with agriculture.As recently as 2017, the historical linguist George Starostin provided the following information in a piece titled “Macrofamilies and agricultural lexicon Problems and Perspectives (from the book Language Dispersals Beyond Farming),” which shows his opinion on Afro-Asiatic and potential agricultural connections:On the whole, I have to state that there is not a single common Afroasiatic root that would be phonetically, semantically, and distributionally comparable with the several examples of common “Euskaro-Caucasian” agricultural lexicon listed above. Particularly telling is the lack of convincing parallels between Cushitic, Omotic, and “Narrow Afroasiatic”, comprising all the other branches; at the same time, a few cultural isoglosses between Semitic and Chadic (more rarely, Berber and Egyptian) inspire more confidence about agriculture on the “narrow” level, already after the separation of Cushitic (such as Semitic *tiʔin- ‘fig-tree’, Berber *tiHVyn- ‘fig tree’, Chadic *tiʔun- / *tiʔan- ‘mahogany, fig tree’, etc.), but even on that level it is hard to find one etymon that would unquestionably qualify as the optimal candidate for a specific agricultural meaning on the level of at least two proto-branches.…For now, we simply have to accept the fact that a lot of research on various subgroups of Afroasiatic is still necessary in order to properly resolve the issue – and that, for the moment, strong evidence for agriculture in Proto-Afroasiatic is non-existent.Note: Some sources will say that the fig tree has been domesticated only since the Early Holocene (c. 11,700–10,500 cal BP) in the Jordan Valley, and was later found in other localities. [18] However, others, such as Tim Denham in his work “Early fig domestication, or gathering of wild parthenocarpic figs?,” will say the following:In conclusion, an interpretation of the preferential gathering of wild, persistent and ‘seedless’ female figs is sufficient to account for the remains at Gilgal I and Netiv Hagdud. Although figs appear to have been commonly exploited across the Fertile Crescent at this time, there is no need to invoke cultivation, domestication and horticulture (Kislev et al. 2006a; 2006b). Selective gathering of, and a preference for parthenocarpic figs would have been a pre-condition and impetus for subsequent domestication based on seed-based reproduction or vegetative propagation, wherever and whenever this occurred (Zohary & Hopf 2000). Therefore, contra Bellwood, the archaeobotanical figs are not ‘the oldest evidence for deliberate planting of a food-producing plant’, they may simply represent ‘gathering food in the wild’. [19]Note: Proto-Berber *tiHVyn is translated as “date” in Militarev’s relevant publications, not “fig tree.” [20][21] So, that might have been a misreading on Starostin’s part.Considering that this root for “fig tree” is seen in at least two Afro-Asiatic branches at the proto-level, and possibly in Omotic (albeit, in only one language), this might indicate a movement toward incipient agriculture…or, it may not, since, once again, agricultural terminology isn’t common across the phylum. Likewise, at least according to Starostin, the terms for “fig tree” don’t appear to show links to agricultural practices. It really could just be that they were intensively gathered for a long time, as Denham suggests. [22]One could point toward the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, since, even though it’s primarily characterized by farming and, to a lesser extent, herding as well, PPNB populations had actually spread as far afield as the Southern Sinai, and the populations that came to occupy the Sinai during the PPNB were hunter-gatherers. So, one could point toward this reality and take this as a reason to consider a PPNB link for Proto-Afro-Asiatic.Above: A map of socioeconomic entities at the time when the Neolithic Revolution was completed and before the temporary collapse caused by a short-term dry and cold event around 8,200 cal BP. [23]However, the issue with this is that the PPNB period (10,500 years ago - 8,400 years ago) even in its earliest stages post dates Proto-Afro-Asiatic, and even PPNB individuals in the Sinai were actually in regular contacts and had intricate relationships with fully agricultural PPNB populations in the Levant. The same might also apply to the PPNA period, since, besides a single possible site in Abu Madi I in the Southern Sinai (also sometimes called the Epi-Harifian), it never existed anywhere else in the Sinai and still postdates most Proto-Afro-Asiatic estimates (Proto-Afro-Asiatic = ~ 13,500 - 14,000 years old at the time of disintegration | PPNA = ~ 11,750 - 10,500 years ago). [24][25][26][27]Additionally, the Sinai was almost completely devoid of people at this time; rather, the relatively short-lived Harifian culture in the Sinai came to an end and the land was then replaced by PNNB hunter-gatherers. The span of time between the two appears to have seen little if any human presence. The publication “Natufian Foragers in the Levant/Ruminations of the Role of Periphery and Centre in the Natufian” says the following:Ultimately, the Harifians passed a critical threshold and simply had no choice but to relocate, either to adjacent regions, or, farther afield (Goring-Morris 1991).23 It was almost a thousand years later during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, with the onset of ameliorating conditions, that groups re-populated the Negev and Sinai; they were mobile foragers, in the mold of their earlier Epipaleolithic predecessors, forming two distinct facies of the greater PPNB koine (Barzilai 2010; Bar-Yosef 1984; Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen 1989b; Goring-Morris 1993).The same indistinct association of Afro-Asiatic to agriculture also applies even to Afro-Asiatic connections to the Natufians, since, while being proto-agricultural (i.e., “cultivator-foragers”) sedentary and semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers rather than being truly agricultural across the board (some Natufians did, however, show early agricultural practices), most historical linguists don’t believe that Proto-Afro-Asiatic lexicon shows definitive signs of this kind of lifestyle, just something reminiscent of it. During the late Natufian era, there was a significant increase in hunting, gathering, and mobility during the Younger Dryas, which coincided with the appearance of the Harifian culture (12,500 - 11,650 years ago), but its dispersals (often described as a “retreat”) began to happen after 11,650 years ago. The dispersals were to the south (e.g. Abu Madi I (Southern Sinai), 11,650 - 11,100 years ago (the Epi-Harifian)), to the north, and to the east, but not to the west. [28] [29] which would still postdate proto-Afro-Asiatic.Note: The lack of descriptions of a westward “retreat” doesn’t necessarily mean there couldn’t have been some outflow of people that just didn’t show up in the archaeological record.Beyond this, Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers appear to have been primarily hunter-gatherers who, at most, were only semi-sedentary. One might be able to glean this, for example, from common Afro-Asiatic words for “build,” which also appears to have sometimes taken on the meaning of “house” or “hut.” However, there doesn’t seem to be any unambiguous words for “village” or “storage place,” which were commonplace at the time of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.Proto-Afro-Asiatic: *mVn- ~ *bVn ~ *-bǐn-“build, create, house” [30]Chadic: *b-n- ~ *bǝn- “build, house”Ankwe: pìn “house”Bolewa: bìn “room, hut”Kanakuru: mina “house”Sokoro: be:ni “to build”Bole: bònò “house”Mokilko: bîno “grass hut”Proto-Semitic: *bVn- ~ *bny “to build”Arabic:بنى (banā) “to build, to construct, to raise”Hebrew: בנה (baná) “to build, to construct, to raise”Ugaritic: bny “to build”Cushitic: *mVn- ~ *mǐn- ~ *mǎn- (irregular anlaut)Sidamo:min “to build”minē “house”Beja: man- “to create”Omotic:Dime: bin- "build, create"Above: PPNB Material Culture, including residential structures.All of this seems to be at odds with a Levantine connection, but there actually appears to be at least one last possibility of a Levantine link from a non-genetic standpoint that I’ve recently been presented with from a fellow enthusiast. Epipaleolithic assemblages from Helwan in the Cairo Governate of Egypt have yielded what are often called Helwan assemblages (especially lunates (*used frequently in wild grass/grain harvesting)), which have been occasionally found in the Early Natufian culture and the Harifian culture of the Sinai.However, rather than the totality of the assemblages resembling Natufian or Harifian assemblages, they most closely resembled Mushabian and Ramonian assemblages (also sometimes called the Final Mushabian), and appear to have represented an extension of the Mushabian and Ramonian territories between 15,000 and 13,700 years ago (or, alternatively, c. 18,500/17,750 - 15,000 years ago and 17,750 - 15,000 for the Mushabian and Ramonian, respectively (cf., the next paragraph)). [31] One source I have has suggested that the presence of these assemblages might indicate a culture or industry called the “Helwanian,” [32] but that seems to be an unpopular stance. Rather, again, the prevailing opinion is that it’s an extension of the aforementioned cultures.Another site called Helwan 7, which also fits the Mushabian and Ramonian stylistically, has been dated on ostrich eggshell fragments to be 18,770 ± 130 years old (Bln-4484 I, 22476 ± 339 cal BP) and/or 18,110 ± 150 years old (Bln-4484 II, 21841 ± 374 cal BP). The caveat is that dates contradict to the majority of dates from the Sinai and Negev, where the Mushabian has dates from 17,000 -14,000 years ago. Additionally, since they are surface sites, and due to the nature of the material, one must exercise some level of caution in the dating, but the antiquity of the site is telling. [33]Above: Projectile point typology for the Southern Levant. [34]The Mushabian and Ramonian cultures are sometimes also called proto-agricultural (less so then the Natufian culture), and they inhabited the Sinai, Negev, and also the Nile Delta. [35] So, surprisingly, the cultures spanned both Western Asia and Northeastern Africa (see below), and are the only ones to be identified so far.While some links of the Mushabian to Africa have been entertained even as recently as 2013 by O. Bar-Yosef (most notably via influence from Iberomaurusians), most newer literature on the Mushabian seems to point toward it being primarily of Eastern Levantine Epipaleolithic origin. That doesn’t necessarily eliminate a North African connection (Yosef’s findings aren’t irrelevant), [36] but it does certainly show that the Mushabian culture cannot be interpreted simply as a North African transplant as it has often been viewed. Additionally, tellingly, Helwan assemblages have actually been identified in the Dahlak islands of Eritrea dated to 8,800 - 8,600 years ago, 1,800 km (~1,118.5 miles) south of the Nile delta. [37] Considering how rare these assemblages are, and considering how this appears to have been passed on as a cultural attribute (stated in relevant literature), that hints at a real movement of people from north to south, and at least some kind of sound Southwestern Asian connection for the phylum.Above: Map of Near East showing the distribution (shaded) of Middle Epipalaeolithic Mushabian, Ramonian and Late Epipalaeolithic Terminal Ramonian sites (from “Packaging the Levantine Epipalaeolithic: a view from the Negev and Sinai (2019)”)Note: The photo shows what was the territory of the Mushabian and Ramonian using current geography, not Epipaleoithic geography. During the Epipaleolithic, sea levels were considerably lower, such that, for example, the Gulf of Suez was completely above the sea. It’s also possible that the territory could’ve been even greater, since the nature of the Nile Delta soil and accompanying floods over the millennia aren’t helpful for the preservation of ancient artifacts.In particular, Thomas Hikade in the book A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (2012) interpreted this finding as the following:Later, during the Epipaleolithic, hunter-gatherers crossed, apparently back and forth, from the Sinai to the Nile Valley, where they stayed in seasonal camps. Several of the campsites were discovered in the 19th century at Helwan, just south of modern Cairo (Schmidt 1996). The type-fossils of the toolkit used by these hunter-gatherers were the “Helwan lunate” and the notched “Helwan point,” which show similarities with stone tool traditions of the Sinai. One similar arrowhead was also discovered in Layer 1 at the Neolithic site of Merimde-Benisâlame in the western Nile Delta (Einwanger 1984: PI. 57.I.1106). Pottery from the same layer also seems to have affinities with material from southwest Asia and might be an indication of contact or migration between this region and the Nile Delta (Einwanger 1984: 59–63).So, is this the end of the story? No, not quite. From a linguistic angle, Afro-Asiatic appears to show a distant relationship (in the morphological similarities rather than lexical) to African phyla, notably (and, on the surface, a bit oddly) Niger-Congo, to the exclusion of Eurasian phyla, including both extant and extinct phyla in Western Asia. I had actually noticed a few of these similarities years ago and was surprised at some of the overlap, but until very recently, I didn’t take them seriously (i.e., I believed that all of them could only be coincidental resemblances), since the two phyla’s potential Urheimats were so distant from one another, and since the phyla and their speakers, seemed so different.However, a number of sources (books and even a fairly recent study (Abstract Profiles of Structural Stability Point to Universal Tendencies, Family-Specific Factors, and Ancient Connections between Languages (2012) (Figure 2)) have touched on these linguistic similarities, and, while few overall, they could make one question chance as a satisfactory explanation for their existence. All of this made me reconsider their significance. Below are some of the morphological similarities noted by Lipiński in the book Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (1996) (examples mostly sourced from other material):Causative verbal extensional affix:Afro-Asiatic: *šV- ~ -s- (or sometimes *t) [38]Kabyle: s(se)- ~ ssu:sse-kcem “make enter, introduce”Egyptian: ś-ś'nh “to make live, to nourish”Oromo: -sdammaq-s “to awaken”Aari: -sAari: lanq-s- “to make you tired”Proto-Semitic: -ša-*-ša-p(a)ris “cause to divide”Niger-Congo: °-cV/sV (or sometimes °tV)Temne: (ə̀)s [39]θɔ́mɔ̀-s “cause to dance”Degema: -ese ~ ɛsɛ [40]kir-ese “cause to return”Kinyarwanda: -eesh: [41]a-ra-na-ha-ki-zi-ba-ku-n-som-eesh-eesh-er-er-ez-a “She is also making them read it (book) with them (glasses) to you for me there"Swahili: -es-/-ez-/-ish-/-esh-kupiganisha “to make hit each other”Also cf., Proto-Khoe-Kwadi *-s(i)Reversive verbal extensional suffix:Afro-Asiatic: *-tV (encodes a passivity as well)Proto-Semitic: -t-*-t-paris “to un-divide”Tuareg: ətt-ətt-ărmăs “to be taken”Gamo: ett-bakˀ-ett-ees “to be beaten”Niger-Congo: °-tVFula(ni): -(i)t-'o-maɓɓ-it-ii yolnde “he opened the door” (after shutting it)Serer: -tme-xe liw-t-aa “I’m untangling”Reciprocal verbal extensional affix:Afro-Asiatic: *nV-/mV- (also can encode passivity, intransitivity, and middle voice)Kabyle: m(ye)- ~ myu-~:s-m-enɣ “to make kill each other” [42]Tuareg: ənm-ənm-əɣər “to call each other”Proto-Semitic: -n-*-n-paris “divide oneself”Old Assyrian: na-nasbutū, "they hold each other fast"Beja: mo-amodārna "kill each other!"“Lowland East Cushitic”: n-n-d'el- “to be born”Niger-Congo: °-nVTemne: -nɛ̀shèl-nɛ̀ “to laugh at oneself” [43]Yao: -antaam-uk-ul-igw-aasy-an-a “cause each other to be unseated”Swahili: -anapend-ana “love each other”Note: These likenesses aren’t entirely missing outside of Africa (e.g., causative /s/ is found in Sino-Tibetan and some Native American languages), but they seem to have been missing in West Asia.Most recently, Alexander Militarev, who has been supportive of or at least sympathetic toward a Levantine homeland (he believes there are lexical parallels between Afro-Asiatic, Sumerian (some are specious, but others look plausible), and possibly “North Caucasian,” and, most recently, believes that at least incipient agricultural practices may be traceable to Proto-Afro-Asiatic), has recently stated that there are good reasons to consider an African Urheimat for Afro-Asiatic. He said the following information in his publication “Proto-Afrasian names of ungulates in light of the Proto-Afrasian homeland issue (2020),” which provides possible counter-arguments to a Levantine homeland. Bear in mind, however, that there’s a caveat:Counter-arguments rely on the repertoire of the PAA zoonyms denoting numerous African wild bovids (including most “antelopes”), elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, crocodiles and odd-toed ungulates (except for onager) and large carnivores (lion, leopard, wolf, jackal, etc.). African animals did not inhabit the Levant during the warmer Preboreal phase of Holocene, which includes the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 9,500‒8,500 BCE, see Table 1), though the names of these animals are technically reconstructed on the PAA level. Regular consonantal correspondences between the reflexes of these roots point to their PAA origin, though the primary meaning of PAA terms is hard to specify considering the length of time that has passed since the PAA split.Climate of the Levant in the era of the Natufian culture (ca. 12,500−9,500 BCE) was unacceptable for tropical mammals. The Natufians hunted only the following ungulates: gazelles [Gazella gazella, G. subgutturosa], deer [Cervus elaphus, Damadama], ibex [Capra ibex], aurochs [Bos primigenius], wild boar [Sus scrofa] and onager [Equus hemionus]. A corresponding set of wild animal names has been reconstructed for Proto-Semitic (see SED II) whose Urheimat was most likely situated in West Asia, including the Levant, whereas for PAA as many as ca. 50 terms for wild ungulates have been reconstructed, most of them presumably representing various species. Such a variety of ungulate species is typical of the North East African sub-equatorial fauna, which has essentially remained unchanged since the end of Pleistocene.Many terms denoting tropical African “antelopes” and largest animals such as elephant, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, are to be formally considered PAA as well. These PAA roots are usually well reflected in Chadic (less so in Berber and Egyptian), Cushitic, and/or Omotic, but poorly attested in Semitic, whose original habitat being West Asia, the terms for “largest herbivores” sometimes refer to mythical animals (‘monster’, ‘fabulous bull’ and the like), while those for other ungulates usually denote various species of cattle, sheep and goats, asses (133), horses and camels.133: In this connection it is worth mentioning that the only species of odd-toed ungulates attested in the Levant is the onager, whereas Africa was home to several species of wild equids.Another group of PAA zoonyms relevant for the Urheimat problem is represented by predators. There are 8 reconstructed terms for canines including ‘dog’ (*kawit-, *kwihan-, *KVʒ/ǯim-), ‘k. of wild canine’ (*ʔaway-, *ʔaw/ys-, *bawiḥ-, *kur(-ay-), *wanŝ-), 4 undifferentiated terms ‘k. of canine or hyena’ (*ʔa/usk-ay-, *baʔVŝ-, *gVd-*wahr-), 9 terms for felines including ‘lion’ (*labiʔ-), ‘leopard or lion’ (*baʔy-), ‘k. of (wild) feline’ (*ʕariw-, *baʔis-, *da(ʔ/y)m-, *giwar-, *layč-, *mary-, *sawr-), and one undifferentiated term ‘k. of feline, hyena or viverra’ (*ʔaǯur-). These considerations should rather stimulate searching for the PAA homeland in the East African area, a hypothesis already voiced by several scholars, including Igor M. Diakonoff and others.Above: Presence/absence of species of ungulates and carnivores between the terminal Pleistocene and present-day showing local extinctions and introductions of wild and domesticated species. [44]Note: Militarev’s mentioning that many animals reconstructed to the PAA level can be used to help an African homeland is somewhat confusing. Surprisingly, besides rhinos and elephants, many of the animals he brought up in the quotes above appear to have been in the Levant as well during the late Epipaleolithic (see above). Lions and even hippos and crocodiles had been living in the Levant until fairly recently, with hippos apparently going extinct only during the Bronze Age, and with leopards and hyenas (only striped, though, not spotted) still in existence there. Nevertheless, I suppose one could say that these animals may have been more abundant in Africa than in the Levant, though, since, as he said, the climate was less tolerable to “tropical animals” at the time. Additionally, the great variety of terms for ungulates he speaks of and the terms for “elephant” and “rhinoceros” could indeed point toward the original speakers being in Northeast Africa rather than the Levant.Note: Reconstructions for Proto-Afro-Asiatic might be imprecise due to issues of unrecognized loanwords, semantic leniency, and sometimes even two distinct reconstruction of the same word depending on the linguist reconstucting it. [45]Additionally, even if looking at Natufian hunter-gatherers for the sake of providing an Epipaleolithic proxy, they still appear to show a relationship to Africa to the exclusion of other Western Eurasian populations both genetically and culturally.To begin with, Natufians apparently had a significant minority of Iberomaurusian ancestry (~27% officially, but quite possibly lower), which itself included both very early Eurasian ancestry from Paleolithic Eurasians moving into Africa and African ancestry native to North Africa (Ancestral North Africa), and also apparently a comparatively smaller share of ancestry (~6%) common to non-Bantu-speaking East African populations, including Nilotic speakers, Omotic speakers, and the Hadza. [46][47] Moreover, Natufians shared at least one cultural trait with Iberomaurusians in the form of the avulsion of the two front teeth. This practice was very common amongst Iberomaurusians and has shown up somewhat less frequently in many Natufian individuals to the exclusion of their neighbors in Western Asia. [48]Note: While there’s nothing known about Mushabians and Ramonians yet, given their geographical position, it’s quite feasible that they had a similar makeup to Natufians and possibly even a higher African component due to their closer proximity to the African mainland and, by extension, Nile Valley inhabitants.Additionally, for the previously-mentioned haplogroup E-Z830 (the branch of haplogroup E that all sampled Natufians and most Neolithic Levantine peoples fell under), its ancestor is haplogroup E-M35, which likely arose in North Africa or Northeast Africa, and which is descended from haplogroup E, which almost certainly arose in Africa (most likely Eastern Africa) before spreading to Southwest Asia and throughout the rest of Africa. Beyond this, E-M78 lineages (a sister of E-Z830) are far more common in Afro-Asiatic speakers (Omotic speakers as well) than E-Z830 lineages are. E-M78 (E1b1b1a) has been identified in one PPNB sample so far, but whether its presence signifies an unrecognized holdover from the earlier Natufian period or if it represents a small migration into the Levant from Northeast Africa hasn’t yet been ascertained. [49]In terms of mtDNA, haplogroup M1a, which is a typical and widespread Afro-Asiatic-associated lineage, has not been found so far in any of the ancient samples of the various ancient Levantine peoples (i.e., Natufians, Neolithic Levantine peoples, Chalcolithic Levantine peoples, and Bronze Age Levantine peoples all lacked this lineage), and, while its ancestor is of likely Eurasian origin, M1a appears to be indigenous to Northeast Africa and apparently first appeared 21,000 - 24,000 years ago. [50] Then, some other Eurasian lineages that are shared with ancient Levantine peoples have been present in Africa amongst Iberomuarusians, such as mtDNA haplogroup N, thus highlighting its great antiquity in Northern Africa. [51]Additionally, while Natufian-like and Neolithic Levantine-like ancestry is clearly seen throughout the domain, there seems to be a comparatively thin but similarly widespread signal of broadly Sudanese-like ancestry (peaking in modern Nilotic speakers, notably the Dinka) seen in most of the Afro-Asiatic-speaking domain (seen in Guanches (presumed Afro-Asiatic speakers), Egyptians, [52] Cushitic speakers, Omotic speakers, etc). I’m certain at least some of this ancestry is due to intermarriage with non-Afro-Asiatic speakers who were high in this ancestral component, but I’m doubtful that intermarriage can encompass the totality of this ancestry.From a uniparental DNA perspective as well, interestingly, one sees mtDNA haplogroup L3 (no downstream designation, unfortunately) in the PPNB period in the Levant (Tell Halula in Northern Syria) and also surprisingly even one individual with the mtDNA haplogroup L0f2b (the individual’s Y-DNA was J1a2b) dated to 1,424 - 1,288 B.C.E. during the Southern Levantine Bronze Age (Jordan to be specific). [53][54] That actually gives reasonable evidence for bidirectional flows of people between Africa and the Levant well before the common era, even though the manner by which these haplogroups entered the Levant isn’t well understood yet.One can likely see by now that researching the homeland of Afro-Asiatic is not straightforward, even more so than I thought when writing previous answers on this topic. Until recently, I stuck to one possible explanation, but given how much isn’t known yet, I think at least a few possibilities would have to be considered.One possibility that I had been strongly entertaining until recently is that Proto-Afro-Asiatic was the language of Nile Valley inhabitants during the Epipaleolithic (mainly from Upper Egypt to Lower Nubia’s southern edge in Northern Sudan) who had a fairly similar lifestyle to the Natufians and were semi-sedentary, wild-grass-and-grain-collecting hunter-gatherers who were accustomed to flint and bow and arrow use, though seemingly not showing such distinctly proto-agricultural practices as Natufians. Additionally, many appear to have hunted many of the animals that Militarev mentioned, such as hippos, red-fronted gazelles, aurochs, and hartebeests, [55] which, at least according to him, are reconstructable to Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Hippos, in particular, while present in the Levant, weren’t hunted by Natufian hunter-gatherers, as was alluded to previously. [56]Above: The Mesolithic settlement phase at Al Khiday 2; a) pits in one section of the excavated area and b) the semi-subterranean hut with a fireplace in the center, indicated by the whitish ashy area. This site is 25 km south of Khartoum (the southernmost edge of the Nubian region), and it gives an idea of the lifestyle of the earlier Nile inhabitants.What I posited is that after encountering an early expanding Epipaleolithic Levantine-like people (e.g., the people of the Harifian culture [57]), or a closely related people, early Nile Valley inhabitants (available samples show they were rather [though, not entirely] physically unlike Near Eastern populations) then largely replaced these earlier inhabitants genetically over a period of time, but the language of the earlier inhabitants continued being spoken without replacement, albeit with presumed outside influence from the intrusive group(s).Another reason for supposing this is that the archaeological record north of southern Middle Egypt is relatively scarce, and, at the time, I hadn’t been aware of any Epipaleolithic sites in Lower Egypt to look at. This phenomenon of genetic replacement in spite of language continuity is surprisingly not very uncommon, and there are many examples of this happening worldwide, with at least one major example of this even happening in the Afro-Asiatic domain itself (cf., Semitic). This kind of phenomenon can give the wrong impression of where a language family spread from.The limitations to applying this scenario to Afro-Asiatic at large are that no other identified family is older than Afro-Asiatic and its immense time-depth means that there are many, many unknowns to consider or confounding information. Additionally, since the Nile Delta has yielded assemblages, that shows at least some evidence that there was some kind of human presence north of where most of the northern Nile Valley inhabitants lived, which opens up more possibilities.Above: Map above is of the Nile Basin (left) and the Main Nile Basin (right). Below are specifically Epipaelotlithic sites (excluding Lower Egypt).Hatched area: broad geographical extent of Nubia. Numbers:1, Helwan; 2, Nazlet Khater; 3, Sodmein Cave; 4, Makhadma5, Qena; 6, Taramsa; 7, Dishna; 8, Dakhleh Oasis9, Kharga Oasis; 10, Esna; 11, Edfu; 12, El Hosh; 13, Qurta14, Kom Ombo; 15, Wadi Abu Subeira16, Wadi Kubbaniya; 17, Aswan; 18, Tushka19, Jebel Sahaba; 20, Wadi Halfa; 21, El Barga; 22, Ed-Debba [58]Beyond this, current archaeological data from a 2021 study by Alice Leplongeon (along with an earlier 2015 study) suggests that due to the relatively unique lithic constructions of the Nile Valley, there appears to be little interaction between Levantine populations and [most] Nile Valley inhabitants during the latter half of the Epipaleolithic in spite of being in very, very close proximity (however, the earlier half is a slightly different, more interesting story [59]). A possible exception is the Isnan culture, which apparently showed some level of similarity to the Mushabian complex’s tool-making practices. [60] A caveat of this is that imprecision in the available methodologies has contributed to a kind of “artificial isolation” of the Nile Valley cultures. [61] Additionally, there’s still the possibility of significant population movements without there necessarily being any changes in the archaeological record, which Leplongeon acknowledges. [62]Interestingly, it appears that any potential Epipaleolithic introgression from heavily Natufian-like and/or Neolithic Levantine-like populations doesn’t seem to have strongly affected much of the pre-existing peoples until quite a while after 10,000 years ago. For instance, while I used to believe that Lower Nile inhabitants (Qadan culture, Sebilian culture, Silsilian culture, etc.) rather quickly mixed with and were eventually replaced genetically by populations rich in Natufian-like and/or PPN-like ancestry, it actually seems that at least some of them persisted for much longer in the region than I first thought, albeit seemingly losing their familiarity with wild plant collection after some time.Above: Map showing the location of a Qarunian site in the Fayum Depression. [63]For example, the Qarunian culture (~ 8,000 years ago) shows signs of continuity with earlier inhabitants both culturally and physically, and the presence of this culture (on the Faiyum Lake in northern Middle Egypt (the location is sometimes described as Lower Egypt), itself only 75 km (~47 miles) from Helwan) points toward a northward expansion of earlier Nile Valley inhabitants right before the Neolithic. All this newer information doesn’t necessarily invalidate an Afro-Asiatic connection or the previous model, but it makes finding a more precise archaeological correlation from the standpoint of most Nile cultures a little bit less clear.As you’re likely aware of now, the other possibility I’ve been considering lately is that Afro-Asiatic may have represented the language of the Mushabian and Ramonian cultures. However, while both cultures would have shown an Eastern Levantine Epipaleolithic connection rather than a clearly African one, the minor African influences in the later Natufian individuals and the distant, yet seemingly meaningful African linguistic affinities of Afro-Asiatic at large could mean that while Proto-Afro-Asiatic may have mostly been in Western Asia and only partly in Africa, its immediate ancestor (i.e., Pre-Proto-Afro-Asiatic), would have been spoken west of the Sinai in Africa proper. This would be if one were to entertain this alternative hypothesis.To move on, while one does see Natufian and Neolithic Levantine ancestry in much of the Afro-Asiatic-speaking domain, due to the lack of all-encompassing and convincing pastoral and agricultural terms, it is quite plausible that pre-existing Afro-Asiatic branches (ancestral to modern ones) had already begun diversifying, but had later absorbed varyingly large waves of further Levantine-linked ancestry, albeit in an altered form.So, for comparison’s sake, one can look at Mycenaean Greeks, who had only 4% - 16% Steppe-related ancestry. [64] On the other hand, modern Greeks have a fair bit more Steppe-related ancestry (~20% on average), [65] which appears to have been gained through intermixing with later Slavic-speaking peoples moving into the Balkans from Northeastern Europe. For instance, one study has estimated that Peloponnesian Greeks have inherited between 0.2% and 14.4% of this ancestry. However, the figure is almost certainly higher in more northerly portions of Greeks (e.g., Central Macedonia), as this answer demonstrates. [66]It appears that the same thing happened to Albanians as well, as they also show significant genetic influence from Slavic populations. [67] In spite of that, the Albanian and Greek languages have remained, both without significant linguistic influence from Slavic languages.This kind of explanation has its merits. For instance, if looking at Egypt, until about 8,000 years ago in the earlier part of the Neolithic in the Nile Valley, hunter-gatherers abounded, but, importantly, there was an influx of West Asian domesticated animals (sheep, goats, and cattle) from the Neolithic Levant (already uncontroversially agricultural)). However, rather than the then-local hunter-gatherers in the Lower Nile Valley becoming agriculturalists, they actually incorporated these domesticated animals into their pre-existing agricultural lifestyle as a supplemental food source, which eventually allowed for the development of a new pastoral-foraging phenomenon. [68]This could have still allowed for a small conduit of people from the Levant (quite possibly, at least in my view, maybe para-Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations) moving into the Nile Valley and the vicinity, which was likely home to multiple Afro-Asiatic branches at the time (almost certainly the respective ancestors of Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic, but also likely Cushitic), the speakers of which likely already having elevated Epipaleolithic Levantine-like ancestry. However, considering the circumstance, it needn’t have resulted in a shift in the pre-existing language(s).Above: The early spread of domesticated animals in the Eastern Sahara. A Timespan 6 – 5 ka cal B.C.E. [69]To help encapsulate this further, Niroyuki Shirai in “The diffusion of material culture and domesticates from the Levant to Egypt” presented this contact situation as the following:Therefore, Bar-Yosef’s suggestion that the PPNB collapse could have triggered the dispersal of Levantine people and their subsequent colonisation of the Nile Delta (Bar-Yosef 2003: 122) is presently an unsubstantiated assumption, because no site of the 7th millennium cal.BC has been found there.…It is certainly surprising that there is no clear evidence of contacts between the southern Levant and the Nile Valley during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, given the distance which could easily have been traversed in a matter of days (Kuijt and Goring-Morris 2002: 428). This is one reason why it has been argued that the diffusion of barley farming and sheep herding from the northern Levant to the Nile Delta might have taken place by sea and not by land (Bar-Yosef 2002a: 54-55). However, the sporadic occurrence of the side-notched and tanged projectile points in northeastern Africa seems to indicate that there were some contacts by land but that these contacts were definitely other than colonisation.This scenario could have then allowed for independent, but parallel developments of agricultural and pastoral terminology across the branches’ respective lineages, which, by then, would’ve already been separated from one another. Additionally, this could allow for an increase in Levantine-like ancestry even without a large-scale displacement of the pre-existing population. It is only later during the Neolithic and Early Predynastic Era that there is very clear evidence of agriculturalist peoples actively moving from the Levant into the Nile Delta and bringing clearly Levantine agricultural traditions with them.That’s to say, it is later in the Nile Delta and much of northern Middle Egypt that one sees the immigration of people who were clearly adept agriculturalists who had intentionally adapted Levantine crops to the Nile River environment, some of which, such as barley and emmer, were not particularly well-suited to the Nile environment. In that particular case, one should indeed expect for this population to have represented a movement of people from the Levant.Note: These incoming Levantine migrants during the very early Predynastic period must have contributed enormously to the ethnogenesis of Egyptians, but they most likely weren’t the source population of the Egyptian language (i.e., Pre-Proto-Egyptian).To return to the possibility of Afro-Asiatic being the language of hunter-gatherers that may have (re-)spread into Africa, one could take a look at the Uralic family for the sake of comparison. For a while, I was under the impression that the Uralic family’s lineage (including its ancestor) has had a very deep history in Northeastern Europe and that early Uralic speakers absorbed the ancestry of an incoming Siberian population, whose ancestry was propagated as the family dispersed.I thought that because of the similarities between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European, the fact that Proto-Uralic’s homeland is still most likely in Northeastern Europe, and also because the presence of Siberian ancestry in Uralic speakers would need an explanation, the linguistic-continuity-in-spite-of-genetic-replacement model can provide an answer to this. However, while I still believe that Proto-Uralic was spoken west of the Urals in Northeastern Europe, I see now that it’s actually likely that its ancestor (Pre-Proto-Uralic) was most likely spoken east of the Urals in Siberia and had likely only introgressed into Europe a few millennia prior to the emergence of Proto-Uralic at most.Above: Note the Garino-Bor culture along the Volga-Kama area marked dark gray, which represents the culture that’s likeliest to be associated with Proto-Uralic. [70]This scenario explains the apparent lack of what are called Archaic Indo-European words in Uralic, [71] quite possibly Uralic’s typological similarities to some phyla in Siberia (not indicative of relatedness, but at least possibly early contact), and also the presence of Siberian ancestry and the Y-DNA haplogroup N1c amongst almost all Uralic speakers, which is a haplogroup that shows a clear relationship to Eastern Eurasian populations. At the same time, current archaeological information does highlight some connection to Siberia (cf., Seimo-Turbino phenomenon), but the connection appears to be a bit unclear. That’s in spite of the fact that the connection on genetic and linguistic grounds seems sound. So, then, Uralic’s lineage spread from Siberia into Europe, then after Proto-Uralic’s disintegration in Northeastern Europe, its lineage spread back into Siberia with many constituent Uralic branches, including the ancestor of the Samoyedic languages and Hungarian (whose respective lineage eventually spread back to Europe).However, there may still be limitations for this kind of proposal when applying it to Afro-Asiatic. First, considering how little is known about Proto-Afro-Asiatic, one could consider it not so useful to talk about Pre-Proto-Afro-Asiatic in the same breath as, say, Pre-Proto-Uralic, which Uralic specialists at least have some concrete idea of what it was like, even though it is still vague. Likewise, again, the spread of a particular ancestral component can coincide with the spread of certain assemblages without a shift in language.For example, Proto-Semitic speakers already had a very large amount of Iranian Chalcolithic ancestry (intrusive to the region), and Kura-Araxes-related pottery (originally localized to Trans-Caucasia) has been identified in the Southern Levant at the very period when Proto-Semitic would have been beginning its initial disintegration into its constituent sub-branches. [72][73][74]To conclude, there are still a few unanswered questions surrounding Proto-Afro-Asiatic, but I think the available information suggests that one should look at the land between or encompassing the lower-most reaches of the Nile Valley and the southwestern-most Levant. The exact identity of the speakers is not completely certain, but it’s quite plausible that they had a significant amount of Natufian-like ancestry (albeit, at least from what I’m presenting, quite possibly not necessarily from Natufians themselves from the onset) at the time that Proto-Afro-Asiatic began disintegrating or, if not, then soon after.An African connection for the phylum remains reasonable and presents many explanations for what is currently known about Proto-Afro-Asiatic, such as its morphological similarities to African phyla and reconstructions of certain fauna, but how this connection manifests with respect to Africa (i.e., A Northeast African homeland for Proto-Afro-Asiatic v. Proto-Afro-Asiatic’s ancestor being spoken in Northeast Africa, but its ancestor, in a way, spreading [back] into Africa) is a bit harder to say as of yet, especially since both the models I presented have their benefits and potential drawbacks.Above: The Lower Nile Valley, Sinai, and Southern Levant.Additionally, on a tangential note, assuming what I’ve presented is correct (I freely admit that I could be wrong, and I trust more useful information is forthcoming), it’s also quite plausible that the Natufians themselves and Neolithic Levantine populations spoke languages that were somehow related to Afro-Asiatic (Para-Afro-Asiatic speakers), even if they may not have been Afro-Asiatic speakers themselves. Part of the reason for why I think so is that the Natufian culture has for a long time either been considered a potential archaeological correlate for Proto-Afro-Asiatic (cf., Militarev and Blažek) or, when it hasn’t been, it has been suggested to be associated with at least a branch of Afro-Asiatic (cf., Ehret).Aside from that, one thing that is certain about the Natufian culture is that the Mushabian and Ramonian cultures contributed to its genesis, and that the Mushabian replaced the earlier Geometric Kebaran industry in the Sinai and southernmost Levant. [75] Since the Mushabian and Ramonian cultures are, at least in my opinion, a good candidate for the Proto-Afro-Asiatic culture, they provide a conduit for viewing the language(s?) of early Levantine peoples as potential relatives of Afro-Asiatic.Footnotes[1] Ancient DNA reveals a multistep spread of the first herders into sub-Saharan Africa - PubMed[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.19.423614v1.full.pdf[3] https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2018-schlebusch.pdf[4] From Hunters to Farmers[5] https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/reader/download/218/218-30-77020-1-10-20170213.pdf[6] The Journal of Indo-European Studies[7] Afroasiatic etymology :[8] mr - Wiktionary[9] https://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/afrfarm.pdf[10] https://starling.rinet.ru/confer/Stolbova-2016.pdf[11] ENSUHKEŠDANNA AND BABA on JSTOR[12] The Four Egyptian Homographic Roots B-3[13] https://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/afrfarm.pdf[14] https://www.jolr.ru/files/(289)jlr2020-18-3-4(199-226).pdf[15] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f697/150781d1acae84be32732be73e0613d6584f.pdf[16] Dead Sea scroll fragments discovered in remote desert cave[17] WATCH: Fragments of 2000-year-old biblical scroll unearthed in Judea desert[18] Multiple Origins of Agriculture in Eurasia and Africa[19] https://sci-hub.st/10.1017/S0003598X00095326[20] https://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/afrfarm.pdf[21] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42938701.pdf[22] Between domestication and civilization: the role of agriculture and arboriculture in the emergence of the first urban societies[23] Multiple Origins of Agriculture in Eurasia and Africa[24] https://www.phil.muni.cz/jazyk/files/AAmigrationsCORR.pdf[25] https://www.jolr.ru/files/(289)jlr2020-18-3-4(199-226).pdf[26] http://lithornis.nmsu.edu/~phoude/African%20genetic%20structure%20supp.pdf[27] https://www.jolr.ru/files/(289)jlr2020-18-3-4(199-226).pdf[28] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285734741_Ruminations_on_the_role_of_periphery_and_centre_for_the_Natufian/figures?lo=1[29] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285734741_Ruminations_on_the_role_of_periphery_and_centre_for_the_Natufian/figures?lo=1[30] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659672[31] Human occupation density and mobility in the lower Nile Valley (75,000-15,000 years ago)[32] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292508850_Prehistoric_Sites_along_the_Edge_of_the_Western_Nile_Delta_Report_on_the_Results_of_the_Imbaba_Prehistoric_Survey_2013-14[33] Human occupation density and mobility in the lower Nile Valley (75,000-15,000 years ago)[34] ARROWS before AGRICULTURE? A FUNCTIONAL STUDY of NATUFIAN and NEOLITHIC GROOVED STONES[35] A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East[36] https://twin.sci-hub.st/6671/536be004710f60b294a316e2a626d9f6/africa-from-48-000-to-9500-bce.pdf[37] Neolithisation of Northeastern Africa edited by[38] Afro-Asiatic languages[39] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239922924_Suffix_Ordering_in_Temne_A_Case_for_Morphotactics[40] http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/37/paper1603.pdf[41] https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/research/workingpapers/volume-15/file37812.pdf[42] Languages of the World[43] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239922924_Suffix_Ordering_in_Temne_A_Case_for_Morphotactics[44] https://zero.sci-hub.st/6961/f6d702171c6aae2753c54e460c3856c9/the-kaleidoscope-of-mammalian-faunas-during-the-terminal-pleisto.pdf[45] The unreliability of Afroasiatic etymologies[46] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2018/09/20/423079.DC1/423079-1.pdf[47] Re-analysis of Whole Genome Sequence Data From 279 Ancient Eurasians Reveals Substantial Ancestral Heterogeneity[48] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299847825_A_Final_Natufian_Population_Health_and_Burial_Status_at_Eynan-Mallaha[49] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.19.423614v1.full.pdf[50] Divorcing the Late Upper Palaeolithic demographic histories of mtDNA haplogroups M1 and U6 in Africa[51] On the origin of Iberomaurusians: new data based on ancient mitochondrial DNA and phylogenetic analysis of Afalou and Taforalt populations[52] Social stratification without genetic differentiation at the site of Kulubnarti in Christian Period Nubia[53] Ancient DNA Analysis of 8000 B.C. Near Eastern Farmers Supports an Early Neolithic Pioneer Maritime Colonization of Mainland Europe through Cyprus and the Aegean Islands[54] The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant[55] https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/bitstream/handle/11122/4510/Triambelas_uaf_0006N_10203.pdf?sequence=1[56] https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/bitstream/handle/11122/4510/Triambelas_uaf_0006N_10203.pdf?sequence=1[57] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285734741_Ruminations_on_the_role_of_periphery_and_centre_for_the_Natufian[58] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03124192/document[59] Human occupation density and mobility in the lower Nile Valley (75,000-15,000 years ago)[60] Human occupation density and mobility in the lower Nile Valley (75,000-15,000 years ago)[61] removing barriers in the way of science[62] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03124192/document[63] https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/reader/download/194/194-30-76484-1-10-20170112.pdf[64] Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans[65] How much of a caveman are you? FAQ[66] Genetics of the peloponnesean populations and the theory of extinction of the medieval peloponnesean Greeks[67] http://journals.plos.org/plosbio...[68] Linseele, V. (2013). Early stock keeping in northeastern Africa. Near Eastern influences and local developments. In: Shirai, N. (ed.). Neolithisation of Northeastern Africa. Studies in Early Near Eastern Production, Subsistence, and Environment 16.[69] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292261807_When_Hunters_Started_Herding_Pastro-foragers_and_the_Complexity_of_Holocene_Economic_Change_in_the_Western_Desert_of_Egypt[70] https://kirj.ee/public/Archaeology/2012/issue_1/arch-2012-1-3-25.pdf[71] https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust264/sust264_hakkinenj.pdf[72] The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant[73] The Early Transcaucasian phenomenon in structural-systemic perspective: Cuisine, craft and economy[74] Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe[75] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346492484_From_the_Epipalaeolithic_into_the_earliest_Neolithic_PPNA_in_the_South_Levant/figures?lo=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic