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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Quetzalcoatl: [qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by rasol: A more intelligible approach to the 'null' hypothesis requires you to prove that either a) West Africa was uninhabited prior to dynastic Nile Valley civilisation. b) West Africa was inhabited, prior to dynastic times, but only by non Niger Congo language speakers. c) Modern West Africans are completely unrelated in language and geneology to the pre dynastic West Africans. :( [/qb][/QUOTE]A couple of relevant quotes to the above Roger Blench. 2006. [i]Archaeology, Language, and the African Past[/i] New York: Altamira Press [QUOTE] pp. 132-133. With some misgivings, Table 3.4 puts forward dates and possible motives for expansion for the families of Niger-Congo. The dates are arranged in order of antiquity, not in the hypothetical order suggested by the genetic tree, and, in many cases the two are strongly at variance. There is no necessary correlation between the age of a family estimated from its apparent internal diversity and the date at which it appears to split from the Niger-Congo tree.. . . . . MANDE 6000 BP Mande languages have spread from north to south with scattered outliers in Nigeria and Cote d’Ivoire. Mande shares the common Niger-Congo roots for cow and goat, and perhaps the Proto-Mande were an isolated livestock-keeping population at the edge of the desert, which expanded southward as habitat change created potential space for livestock keeping. Reconstructions implying cropping are not present in the protolanguage.[/QUOTE]Christopher Ehret. 2000 “Language and History,” in B. Heine and D. Nurse, eds.[i] African Languages.An Introduction[/i] pp. 274-297 Canbridge: Cambridge University Press [QUOTE] p. 294 A second, but still early and important stage in Niger-Congo history was the proto-Mande-Congo era. At this period, or so it appears from the evidence of word histories, the cultivation of the guinea yam and possibly other crops, such as the oil palm, began among at least the peoples of the Atlantic and Ijo-Congo branches of the family (Williamson 1993 proposes the early words for these crops; Greenberg 1964 identifies an Atlantic and Ijo-Congo verb for cultivation, •-lim-). Between possibly about 8000 and 6000 BC, these people spread across the woodland savannahs of West Africa, the natural environment of the Guinea yams. At that time, woodland savannah environments extended several hundred kilometers farther north into the Sudan belt than they do today.[/QUOTE][/qb][/QUOTE]The Blench hypothesis of the Mande living in the Sahara and moving southward does not conflict with my theory of a Saharan origin for the Mande speakers. The term lim, is not the Mande term to cultivate. In al-Imfeld, [b] Decolonizing: African Agricultural History [/b] (2007) , claims that in relation to African agriculture the cultivation of yam began 10,000 years ago and rice cultivation in Africa by 6000 BC. The major cultivated crop of the Mande speakers was millet not the yam. The term for cultivation among the Mande was not [b] lim [/b] is Proto-Paleo-Afro-Dravidian [b] *be[/b] . Millet was probably cultivated over 5000 years ago. The earliest sites for the cultivation of millet lie in the Sahara . Here the earliest archaeological evidence has been found for African millets. The major grain exploited by Saharan populations was rice ,the yam and pennisetum. McIntosh and McIntosh (1988) has shown that the principal domesticate in the southern Sahara was bulrush millet (pennisetum). Millet impressions have been found on Mande ceramics from both Karkarchinkat in the Tilemsi Valley of Mali, and Dar Tichitt in Mauritania between 4000 and 3000 BP. (McIntosh & McIntosh 1983a,1988; Winters 1986b; Andah 1981) The linguistic evidence indicates that the Mande and Dravidian speakers formerly lived in intimate contact , in the Sahara. The speakers of these languages share many terms for agriculture. Given the archaeological evidence for millets in the Sahara, leads to the corollary theory that if the Dravidians originated in Africa, they would share analogous terms for millet with African groups that formerly lived in the Sahara. One of the principal groups to use millet in Africa are the Northern Mande speaking people . The Mande speaking people belong to the Niger-Congo group. Most linguist agree that the Mande speakers were the first Niger-Congo group to leave the original Nile Valley and Saharan highland primary homeands of the Niger-Congo speakers. The Northern Mande speakers are divided into the Soninke and Malinke-Bambara groups. Holl (1985,1989) believes that the founders of the Dhar Tichitt site where millet was cultivated in the 2nd millenium B.C., were northern Mande speakers. To test this theory we will compare Dravidian and Black African agricultural terms, especially Northern Mande. The linguistic evidence suggest that the Proto-Dravidians belonged to an ancient sedentary culture which existed in Saharan Africa. We will call the ancestor of this group Paleo-Dravido-Africans. The Dravidian terms for millet are listed in the [b] Dravidian Etymological Dictionary [/b] at 2359, 4300 and 2671. A cursory review of the linguistic examples provided below from the Dravidian (Kol, Tamil ,Kannanda, & Malayalam ) , Mande and Wolof languages show a close relationship between these language. These terms are outlined below: [CODE]Kol sonna --- --- ---- Wolof (AF.) suna --- ---- --- Mande (AF) suna bara, baga de-n, doro koro Tamil connal varaga tinai kural Malayalam colam varaku tina --- Kannanda --- baraga, baragu tene korale,korle *sona *baraga *tenä *kora [/CODE]Below we will compare other Dravidian and African agricultural terms. These terms come from the Mande languages (Malinke, Kpelle, Bambara, Azer, Soninke), West Atlantic (Wolof, Fulani), Afro-Asiatic (Oromo, Galla), Somali, Nubian and the ancient Egyptian. The Paleo-Dravido-Africans came from a sedentary culture that domesticated cattle and grew numerous crops including wheat and millet. The Egyptian term for cultivation is Ø b j(w) #. Egyptian Ø b j(w) # corresponds to many African terms for cultivation: [CODE]Galla baji 'cultivated field' Tulu (Dravidian language) bey, benni Nubian ba, bat 'hoe up ground' Malinke be Somali beer Wolof mbey, ambey, bey Egyptian b j(w) Sumerian buru, bur 'to root up'[/CODE]These terms for cultivate suggest that the Paleo-African term for cultivate was *be. The Egyptian term for grain is 0 sa #. This corresponds to many African terms for seed,grain: [CODE]Galla senyi Malinke se , si Sumerian se Egyptian sen 'granary' Kannanda cigur Bozo sii Bambara sii Daba sisin Somali sinni Loma sii Susu sansi Oromo sanyi Dime siimu Egyptian ssr 'corn' id. ssn 'lotus plant' id. sm 'herb, plant' id. isw 'weeds'[/CODE]The identification of a s>Ø/#_________e pattern for 'seed,grain' in the above languages suggest that these groups were familiar with seeds at the time they separated into distinct Supersets. The fact that Sumerian Ø se # and Egyptian Ø sen #, and Malinke Ø se # are all separated both in time and geographical area highlight the early use of seeds * se , by Paleo-Dravido-Africans. [CODE] Rice Soninke dugo Vai ko'o Manding malo Dravidian mala-kurula Mende molo, konu Kpelle moloy Boko mole Bisa muhi Busa mole Sa mela Bambara kini Yam Bozo ku, kunan Vai jambi Malinke ku Dravidian kui, kuna, ku Bambara ku[/CODE]It would appear that all the Proto-Dravidians were familiar with the cultivation of rice, yams and millet. This is not surprising because Weber (1998) made it clear that millet cultivation in ancient South Asia was associated with rice cultivation. The linguistic evidence clearly show similarities in the Afican and Dravidian terms for plant domesticates. This suggest that these groups early adopted agriculture and made animal domestication secondary to the cultivation of millet, rice and yams. The analogy for the Malinke-Bambara and Dravidians terms for rice, millet and yams suggest a very early date for the domestication of these crops. In summary, population pressure in the Sahara during a period of increasing hyperaridity forced hunter/gather/fisher Proto-Dravidian people to first domesticate animals and then crops. The linguistic evidence discussed above indicate that the Proto-Dravidians migrated out of Africa to Harappan sites with millet, yam and rice already recognized as principal domesticated crop. This comparison of Mande agricultural terms make it clear, that just like the Egyptian term for dog [b] uher [/b], the speakers of these languages share the terms for cultivate, and seed. It also shows that before the Dravidians separated from the Mande speakers these groups were cultivating also cultivating rice and the yam. [/QB][/QUOTE] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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