Voigt, Rainer (ed. / Hg.): 5000Jahre Semitohamitistik, Kpln 20le A Note on the Spreading of Afroasiatic Gerrit J. Dimmendaal Before the last glacial age ended in Eurasia about 10.000 BP, major parts of Africa were uninhabited by human beings for thousands of years because of the arid conditions and thereby insufficient water supplies for human habitation. Only higher elevations and zones along major rivers were hospitable in many parts of Africa until wetter periods set in roughly between 10.000 BP and 5.000 BP. This at least is what cur rently available archaeological evidence tells us.1 It is within this latter time zone, presumably, that the spread of the Afroasiatic family is to be situated, given the fact that the earliest proofs for the presence of Semitic languages and Ancient Egyptian date back as early as 5.000 BP, i.e. the peri od when desertification had begun to set in again. In view of the current distribution of the Afroasiatic family and what is known about paleo-climatological changes, the putative homeland of this phylum is northeastern Africa, and its spreading across major parts of northern, eastern and central Africa may thus have started as early as 10.000 BP, when a gradual increase in precipitation allowed human beings to explore new ecological zones. Consequently, it was probably during this latter period that geographical “outliers” of Afroasiatic such as Berber and Chadic could spread into areas outside of northeastern Africa. DNA research amongst speakers of Chadic languages suggests that their ancestors entered this area from northeastern or eastern Africa.2 Blench3 argues for a migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists from the Nile Valley across the so-called Wadi Howar 1 See Blench, Roger: Archaeology, Language and the African Past, Lanham, MD: Altamira Press 2006, for a discussion. 2 Cerny, Viktor / Veronica Fernandes / Marta D. Costa/ Martin Hajek/ Connie J. Mulligan / Luisa Pereira: Migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists within Africa based on population structure of Chad Basin and phylogeography of mitochondrial L3f haplogroup, in: B M C Evolutionary Biology 9 (2009). 3 Blench, Roger: The Westward Wandering of Cushitic Pastoralists. Explorations in the Prehistory of Central Africa, in: L ’homme et I’animal dans le bassin du lac Tchad, ed. by C. Baroin and J. Boutrais, Paris: IRD 1999, pp. 39-80.