ABSTRACT
Over fifteen years have passed since Sutton first proposed to a conference at the University of California at Los Angeles that Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples may have been the makers of what he called the ‘Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa’ — the development in the eighth to sixth millennium Bc of a set of riverine and lakeside food-collecting economies all across the sudanic belt of Africa (Sutton 1974). The pre-eminence of Nilo-Saharan languages in later times in nearly all the areas where the aquatic adaptations had taken hold lent his hypothesis a strong plausibility. But on the linguistic side of the correlation, essential information was then lacking. A detailed subclassification of the Nilo-Saharan family, which would have allowed inferences about the ancient locations of its speech communities, did not exist; and a systematic reconstruction of phonological history and of ancient vocabulary in the family, which would have provided information on early economy, had not yet been undertaken.
