Reviewed by Jason D. Haugen, Oberlin College

This volume is a Festschrift for Harold Crane (‘Hal’) Fleming, an anthropologist and linguist with a long history of work in Africa, including both synchronic and historical linguistics. Fleming originated the proposal that Western Cushitic is not actually part of Cushitic but is instead a primary branch from Afro-Asiatic that he refers to as Omotic. Fleming holds an abiding interest in long-range historical comparison and served as a key conduit for the ideas of the Moscow Circle of historical linguists to the western world in the mid to late 1980s.

The book contains twenty-four chapters divided into five parts that show an impressive range of approaches to language in prehistory that cut across the four fields of anthropology. Given limitations of space, I can do little more here than list the papers contained in the volume, but this overview should itself suffice to give the reader an idea of the diversity of topics covered.

Part 1, ‘African peoples’, contains three papers: Shomarka Omar Keita’s ‘Geography, selected Afro-Asiatic families, and Y chromosome lineage variation: An exploration in linguistics and phylogeography’; Christy G. Turner II’s ‘A dental anthropological hypothesis relating to the ethnogenesis, origin, and antiquity of the Afro-Asiatic language family: Peopling of the Eurafrican-South Asian Triangle IV’; and Daniel F. McCall’s ‘African weeks’.

Part 2, ‘African languages—synchronic studies’, has just two papers: Azeb Amha’s ‘Gender distinction and affirmative copula clauses in Zargulla’ and Paul Black’s ‘Riddling in Gidole’.

Part 3, ‘African languages—Classification and prehistory’, contains five papers by Václav Blažek (‘A lexicostatistical comparison of Omotic languages’); Christopher Ehret (‘The primary branches of Cushitic: Seriating the diagnostic sound change rules’); Herrmann Jungraithmayr (‘Erosion in Chadic’); Phillippe Bürgisser (‘On Kunama ukunkula ‘elbow’ and its proposed cognates in Nilo-Saharan languages’); and Roger M. Blench (‘The problem of pan-African roots’).

Part 4, ‘Languages of Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas’, broadens the geographical scope considerably. The papers in this section include those by Allan R. Bomhard (‘Some thoughts on the Proto-Indo-European cardinal numbers’); Juha Janhunen (‘Some Old World experience of linguistic dating’); John D. Bengston (‘The languages of northern Eurasia: Inference to the best explanation’); Michael Witzel (‘Slaying the dragon across Eurasia’); Jonathan Morris (‘Trombetti: The forefather of Indo-Pacific’); Jane H. Hill (‘Otomanguean loan words in Proto-Uto-Aztecan maize vocabulary?’); and Larry Lepionka (‘Historical interpretations of geographical distributions of Amerind subfamilies’).

Finally, Part 5, ‘Human origins, Language origins, and Proto-Sapiens language’, contains seven papers, Stephen L. Zegura’s ‘Current topics in human evolutionary genetics’; Philip Lieberman’s ‘A wild 50,000-year ride’; Ofer Bar-Yosef’s ‘Can Paleolithic stone artifacts serve as evidence for prehistoric language?’; George van Driem’s ‘The origin of language: Symbiosism and symbiomism’; Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Some speculations on the evolution of language, and the language of evolution’; Alain Matthey de l’Etang and Pierre J. Bancel’s ‘The age of Mama and Papa’; and Pierre J. Bancel and Alain Matthey de l’Etang’s ‘The millennial persistence of Indo-European and Eurasiatic pronouns and the origin of nominals’.

The book also contains several photos of Fleming, a foreword on Fleming by the editor, and a comprehensive list of Fleming’s publications at the time of printing.