Man, I haven't posted for a long time on the subject of anthropology since my big Ancient Egypt essay.

If you've read that essay, you'd probably encountered the term "Afroasiatic", which denotes a language phylum that appears to have originated in Africa during the late Paleolithic. Well, there exist a handful of people who deny the phylum's African origin. One of these is a housewife by the name of Mathilda, who has a post on her blog "Mathilda's Anthropology" arguing for an Asian origin. She claims that proto-Afroasiatic has words for animals native to southwest Asia, not Africa. Unfortunately, she does not cite a source. I therefore decided to ask an actual linguist about whether proto-Afroasiatic does indeed have words for Asian animals. This is what the linguist, Christopher Ehert (who specializes in African languages) had to say in response to my inquiry:

Dear Mr. Pilcher,

There are absolutely no valid reconstructions of terms for specifically Asian animals back to the proto-Afroasiatic language. Note the adjective 'specifically.'

One book on Afroasiatic reconstruction by Orel and Stolbova includes a number of proposed root terms, some of which probably do reconstruct fairly far back in Afroasiatic language history, which in one branch of the family or another refer to a sheep or a goat,but which in other branches (often not noted by Orel and Stolbova) refer to African antelope species.

There are also a very few terms which always denote goats or sheep but which are suspect as or can be demonstrated to be loanwords that spread long after the family diverged into branches. They indicate the diffusion of the animals from Asia but not of people.

There is a valid old root word for 'cow', but cows were a wild animal of the Sahara, probably as far south as Eritrea, as well as the regions from Europe to India. The presence of a name for the cow is thus not diagnostic of an extra-African origin for the family. In any case the term does not go back to the very earliest stage, the proto-Afroasiatic period.

A single domestic animal, the donkey, does have a validly reconstructible Afroasiatic root word, but the donkey's wild area was Africa, not Asia, and the donkey was domesticated by Afroasiatic speakers in Africa.

So if there's no valid reconstruction of proto-Afroasiatic mentioning Asian animals out there, where is Mathilda getting her information? My suspicion is that she (pardon my language) pulled it out of her ass. Either that or she's relying on a discredited reconstruction. Whichever, it's odd that she does not cite the reconstruction she's using.