The Sahara desert itself is bigger than the contiguous USA.........then there is sub Saharan Africa............where the human race was born..........none of this is new............

Mesolithic era[edit]

Saharan cave painting from Tassili n'Ajjer [Berber: Plateau of the Chasms].

Dating to the much more recent Mesolithic era, stone blades and tools, as well as small stone human figurines, of the Capsian culture (named after Gafsa in Tunisia) are associated with the prehistoric presence of Berbers in North Africa. The Capsian is that archaic culture native to the Maghrib region, circa twelve to eight kya. During this period the Pleistocene came to an end with the last ice age, causing changes in the Mediterranean climate. The African shore slowly became drier as the "rain belts moved north".^[15] Also related to the Berbers are some of the prehistoric monuments built usingvery large rocks (dolmens). Located both in Europe and Africa, these dolmens are found at locations throughout the western Mediterranean.^[16] The Capsian culture was preceded by the Ibero-Maurusian in North Africa.^[17]

Saharan rock art[edit]

Saharan rock art, the inscriptions and the paintings that show various design patterns as well as figures of animals and of humans, are attributed to the Berbers and also to black Africans from the south. Dating these art works has proven difficult and unsatisfactory.^[18][19] Egyptian influence is considered very unlikely.^[20] Some images infer a terrain much better watered. Among the animals depicted, alone or in staged scenes, are large-horned buffalo (the extinct bubalus antiquus), elephants, donkeys, colts, rams, herds of cattle, a lion and lioness with three cubs, leopards or cheetahs, hogs, jackles, rhinoceroses, giraffes, hippopotamus, a hunting dog, and various antelope. Human hunters may wear animal masks and carry their weapons. Herders are shown with elaborate head ornamentation; a few dance. Other human figures drive chariots, or ride camels.^[21][22]

Theory of mixed origin[edit]

A commonly held view of Berber origins is that Paleo-Mediterranean peoples long occupying the region combined with several other largely Mediterranean groups, two from the east near S.W.Asia and bringing the Berber languages about eight to ten kya (one traveling west along the coast and the other by way of the Sahel and the Sahara), with a third intermingling earlier from Iberia.^[23][24][25] "At all events, the historic peopling of the Maghrib is certainly the result of a merger, in proportions not yet determined, of three elements: Ibero-Maurusian, Capsian and Neolithic," the last being "true proto-Berbers".^[26]

Cavalli-Sforza also makes two related observations. First, the Berbers and those S.W. Asians who speak Semitic idioms together belong to a large and ancient language family (the Afroasiatic), which dates back perhaps ten kya. Second, this large language family incorporates in its ranks members from two different genetic groups, i.e., (a) some elements of the one listed by Cavalli-Sforza immediately above, and (b) one called by him the Ethiopian group. This Ethiopian group inhabits lands from the Horn to the Sahel region of Africa.^[27] In agreement with Cavalli-Sforza's work, recent demographic study indicates a common Neolithic origin for both the Berber and Semitic populations.^[28] A widespread opinion is that the Berbers are a mixed ethnic group sharing the related and ancient Berber languages.^[29][30]

Perhaps eight millennia ago, already there were prior peoples established here, among whom the proto-Berbers (coming from the east) mingled and mixed, and from whom the Berber people would spring, during an era of their ethnogenesis.^[31][32] Today half or more of modern Tunisians appear to be the descendants, however mixed or not, of ancient Berber ancestors.^[33]

Berber language history[edit]

Afroasiatic language family. With adjustment this map may illustrate the relative situation of widely spoken, ancientBerber. Except for the Punic languagespoken at Carthage and its sphere of trade, (also except for the Ethiopian {marked hereTigre & Amharic}), the Semitic 'branch' languages were not generally spoken in ancient Africa. Later with the spread of Islam(after 632), Arabic supplanted remnant Punic, and also other non-Semitic 'branch' languages of Afroasiatic: ancient Egyptian by the Nile, and in many areas of North Africa the Berber languages.^[34]

In the study of languages, sophisticated techniques were developed enabling the understanding of how an idiom evolves over time. Hence, the speech of past ages may be successively reconstructed in theory by using only modern speech and the rules of phonetic and morphological change, and other learning, which may be augmented by and checked against the literature of the past, if available. Methods of Comparative linguisticsalso assisted in associating related 'sister' languages, which together stem from an ancient parent language. Further, such groups of related languages may form branches of even larger language families, e.g.,Afroasiatic.^{[35][36][37][38][39]}

Afroasiatic family[edit]