Do all or most languages in the world descend from a single proto-language ? And if so what can we tell from linguistic analysis about the speakers of this ancient tongue ? These are the two questions at the heart of this controversial book and the themes clearly outlined by Colin Renfrew in his introduction. The theory of a Nostratic proto-language is not new, but the extremely detailed presentation of historical linguistic evidence provided here is. The lists of possible linguistic roots are not for the faint-hearted, but for serious linguists they provide real meat on which to chew, and, the publishers hope, provide a solid basis for debate.

This volume of essays examines the claim that a linguistic macrofamily can be identified which includes not only the Indo-European and Afroasiatic language families but also the Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian families. The Nostratic case was put by Aharon Dolgopolsky in his The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguitic Palaeontology, and it is here evaluated critically by linguists specialising in the language families concerned. Contents include: The Nostratic Macrofamily (A. Bomhard); Nostratic Languages: Internal and External Relationship (V. Shevoroshkin); Beyond Nostratic in Time and Space (G. Decsy); Nostratic and Linguistic Palaeontology in Methodological Perspective (L. Campbell); Family Trees and Favourite Daughters (A. McMahon, M. Lohr & R. McMahon); Linguistis Palaeontology: For and Against (I. Hegedus); Afroasiatic and the Nostratic Hypothesis (D. Appleyard); The Dravidian Perspective (K. Zvelebil); Altaic Evidence for Nostratic (A. Vovin); On Semitohamitic Comparison (R. Voight); Toward a Future History of Macrofamily Research (D. Sinor).

Do all or most languages in the world descend from a single proto-language ? And if so what can we tell from linguistic analysis about the speakers of this ancient tongue ? These are the two questions at the heart of this controversial book and the themes clearly outlined by Colin Renfrew in his introduction. The theory of a Nostratic proto-language is not new, but the extremely detailed presentation of historical linguistic evidence provided here is. The lists of possible linguistic roots are not for the faint-hearted, but for serious linguists they provide real meat on which to chew, and, the publishers hope, provide a solid basis for debate.

Winner of the 1990 American Book Award What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular. This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages – Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers. Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.

Dziebel has doctorates in both history and anthropology and is currently both advisor to the Great Russian Encyclopedia and senior anthropologist at Crispin Porter + Bogusky advertising agency. His extremely dense work is actually three books in one. The first is a history of kinship studies from the early 19th century to the present. The second is a comparative study of kinship terminology among non-Indo-European languages, for which he has also prepared a data base published on the internet. The third section, highly controversial, as he admits, uses anthropology, mitochondrial studies and linguistics to suggest that the "out of Africa" model of human origins may be in error and that the first humans actually came from the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world.