Independent researcher, 921 Driven St. #204, Peekskill NY 10566 USA [amilitarev@gmail.com]

 

Abstract. This study is a follow-up, which has taken more than 20 years of the author’s article The Prehistory of a Dispersal: Proto-Afrasian (Afroasiatic) Farming Lexicon (Militarev 2002) in which 37 common Afrasian terms were adduced, presumably related to early agriculture. This article, which was met with both vacuous and informative criticism, was my pilot project that presented promising but insufficient evidence in favor of the author’s more general hypothesis about the ancestral homeland of the Proto-Afrasians. One of the main reasons for its “unpersuasive evidence” is that at the time of writing the 2002 article, critical lexicographic and etymological sources by various authors had not yet been published. The present article contains more than a hundred reconstructed common Afrasian terms, provided with the author’s estimates of both the probability of their interpretation as related to early agriculture rather than foraging, and the quality of each etymology from the point of view of its compliance with the norms of the modern state of the classical comparative-historical method, taking into account, in particular, the fair criticism of the previous study. At the same time, the author is even more confident in the position formulated by him in various publications since 1984 and in the 2002 article: The Proto-Afrasian speakers are to be identified with the creators of the Late Natufian and Post-Natufian Early Neolithic archaeological cultures of the Levant3.

Keywords: Proto-Afrasian, reconstructed terms, farming, gathering, Natufian, the Levant, Neolithic.

Received 05.04.2026, revised 24.05.2026, accepted 31.05.2026

DOI: 10.31600/2658-3925-2026-1-5-39

 

For citation: Militarev A. Yu. Common Afrasian terms confirming the transition of the Proto-Afrasian Natufians from gathering to farming in the Levant between the Late Natufian and pre-Ceramic Neolithic. Prehistoric Archaeology. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. 2026 (1), 5–39. DOI: 10.31600/2658-3925-2026-1-5-39

 

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