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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

Going further, we find Nostratic. That is roughly (Afro-Asiatic, (Kartvelian, Dravidian, Eurasiatic))

From  Proto-Dravidian language I find an estimated age of about 5,000 years. Its homeland was likely central to south India.

I can't find a date for  Proto-Kartvelian language, but the speakers of the present-day Kartvelian languages live in the southern Caucasus mountains, suggesting that homeland for their ancestral language's speakers.

Turning to the Afro-Asiatic family, with members Berber (North Africa), Chadic (North-Central Africa), Cushitic (East Africa, Horn of Africa), Egyptian (Nile River), Omotic (East Africa), and Semitic, and the best-known subfamily of it is the that last one of mostly Middle-Eastern languages.  Proto-Semitic language mentions an estimated divergence type of 3,750 BCE, nearly 6,000 years ago. But homeland proposals jump around like crazy: the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahara Desert, and the Horn of Africa.

I've also found Appendix:Proto-Semitic stems - Wiktionary

 Proto-Berber language - a recent dispersion around the time of the Roman Empire, and splitting off from other Afro-Asiatic speakers around 10,000 - 9,000 years ago, likely due to the Neolithic dispersion of farmers and herders.

 Proto-Afroasiatic language - some 16,000 to 12,000 years ago. The lower value is about when agriculture was invented in the Middle East.

 Afroasiatic Urheimat - Levant, Red Sea / Horn of Africa, North Africa, Sahara / Sahel

The hypothesis of spread with agriculture (farming) / pastoralism (herding) points to the Levant.
 
There is another propose Eurasian big family roughly comparable to Nostratic: the  Dené–Caucasian languages

Its members are Na-Dene (North America), Yeniseian (near that Siberian river), Burushaski (N Pakistan), North Caucasian, and Vasconic (Basque and Aquitanian in SE Europe).

Though Dene-Caucasian is usually considered doubtful at best,  Dené–Yeniseian languages seems well-supported.

Dene-Caucasian likely split up about 10,000 years ago, with Na-Dene splitting off first. A lot of these early split dates are very hand-wavy, I must concede.

A possible subdivision is Macro-Caucasian, containing Basque, North Caucasian, and Burushaski.

 Proto-Eskimo - The Eskimo and Aleut branches split around 4,000 years ago, with the Eskimo speakers spreading across the North American Arctic to Alaska, N Canada, and Greenland.

Before the ancestral Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene speakers arrived in the New World, the ancestral Amerind speakers did so. Amerind is Joseph Greenberg's name for his classification of nearly all the New-World languages. However, it has been strongly criticized, and it is widely rejected.

A common Amerind feature is first-person n- and second-person m-. By comparison, a Eurasiatic feature is first-person m- and second-person t-.
 
Turning to  Linguistic homeland or Urheimat (German: "original home") I find a collection of homeland hypotheses.

Like saying that the Turkic homeland is not known with any confidence, and that it may not be in Mongolia but somewhere else between the Caspian Sea and

The Algonquian languages were spread over much of North America, including a thick swath across southern Canada east of the Rocky Mountains, the Atlantic coast to North Carolina, Michigan - Illinois - Tennessee, and Nebraska - Colorado. The  Proto-Algonquian language was spoken some 2,500 - 3,000 years ago, though we are not sure where.

With the langues Wilmot and Yurok of the North Coast of California, they form Algic, and  Proto-Algic was likely spoken some 7,000 years ago, likely in the Columbia Plateau or some other northwestern location.

The Uto-Aztecan languages were spoken in the southwestern United States and western and southern Mexico. From  Proto-Uto-Aztecan language - "Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago."
 
I round out Eurasia with Southeast Asia.

I start with the Tai languages, with national languages Thai and Lao of Thailand and Laos. The  Proto-Tai language has been reconstructed. This family is in the  Kra–Dai languages, likely originating in southern China from several early branchers being there.

Its closest relative may be Austronesian:  Austro-Tai languages

Also in Southeast Asia are the Austroasiatic languages, including Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian).  Proto-Austroasiatic language likely dates back to 2,000 BCE, 4,000 years ago, and was spoken either in the Mekong basin or between it and the Yangtze River.

Rounding it out are the Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages, scattered over Southeast Asia and Southern China.  Proto-Hmong–Mien language has some very different dates for it: 2,500 and 4,300 years ago.

Most of these Southeastern Asian languages have mostly analytic grammar, with verb tense and aspect done with adverbs.


How might they be related? A prominent hypothesis is  Austric languages


Some recent research has been done with the  Automated Similarity Judgment Program - The ASJP Database -
It uses a 40-word Swadesh-based word list and a standardized spelling. But it has not been widely accepted.
 
Can we go even further? Some linguists have done so. Proposed by Harold C. Fleming and Sergei Starostin,  Borean languages includes all but sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and the Andaman Islands.

Seems to me that Borean vs. non-Borean corresponds to non-Negroid (light skin, straight or loosely-curled hair) vs. Negroid (dark skin, tightly-curled hair). So Borean was likely spread by some offshoot human population colonizing northern Eurasia in the latest part of the last glacial era.

SS dated Borean at 16,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic, roughly around when the  Last Glacial Maximum ended. SS's family tree of languages and well-established language families:

  • Altaic: Japonic, Koreanic, Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolic, Nivkh, Ainu
  • Indo-Uralic: Indo-European, Altaic, Uralic, Yukaghir
  • Paleosiberian: Eskimo–Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan
  • Nostratic: Indo-Uralic, Paleosiberian, Sumerian, Elamite, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Afroasiatic
  • Sino-Caucasian: Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, North Caucasian, Hattic, Hurro-Urartian
  • Dene-Caucasian: Yeniseian, Na-Dene, Iberian, Basque, Sino-Caucasian
  • Austro-Tai: Austronesian, Tai–Kadai
  • Austric: Austro-Tai, Hmong–Mien, Austroasiatic
  • Dene–Daic: Dene-Caucasian, Austric
Eurasiatic = Indo-Uralic + Paleosiberian

Some of SS's colleagues believe that the comparative method has given strong evidence for Eurasiatic and Dene-Caucasian, but not as much for Afroasiatic and Austric. They and SS are not sure about Amerind, though HF includes Amerind in Borean. I've seen "SCAN" for this version of Borean: Sino-Caucasian-Amerind-Nostratic.
 
Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective by Murray Gell-Mann, Ilya Peiros, George Starostin

Estimates these split times:
  • Sino-Caucasian: 10 KYA, North Caucasian: 6 KYA, Sino-Tibetan: 6 KYA, Yeniseian: 2 KYA, Basque: modern, Burushaski: modern
  • Eurasiatic: 12 KYA, Altaic: 8 KYA, Eskimo: 2 KYA, Dravidian: 5 KYA, Indo-European: 7 KYA, Uralic: 6 KYA, Kartvelian: 4–3 KYA
  • Afroasiatic: 12 KYA, Omotic: 7 KYA, Cushitic: 9 KYA, Chadic: 7 KYA, Semitic: 7 KYA, Berber: 3 KYA
  • Austric: 10 KYA, Austronesian: 5 KYA, Tai-Kadai: 5 KYA, Austroasiatic: 7 KYA, Miao-Yao: 4 KYA
These dates are extrapolations with statistics, and for Austronesian, I don't know how much it includes non-Malayo-Polynesian members -- that date is not far off for MP itself.

Sino-Caucasian likely also includes at least some of the European Neolithic substrate. This is from such likely substrate borrowings as Proto-Germanic *lambaz (English "lamb", etc.).
 
Turning to Australia, most of the Aboriginal languages are in the Pama-Nyungan family, a family that covers nearly all of Australia except the more west of the northernmost parts of that continent. The  Proto-Pama–Nyungan language was likely spoken about 5,000 years ago in the Gulf Plains of NE Australia (the SE shore of the big gulf in N Australia).

The non-Pama-Nyungan ones have more obscure relations, though I've seen  Macro-Pama–Nyungan languages

As to what caused that colonization of 5,000 years ago, it may be some ecological issue like climate getting more hostile, like what happened to the Sahara Desert over the Holocene. Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara | Science Advances
During the “Green Sahara” period (11,000 to 5000 years before the present), the Sahara desert received high amounts of rainfall, supporting diverse vegetation, permanent lakes, and human populations. Our knowledge of rainfall rates and the spatiotemporal extent of wet conditions has suffered from a lack of continuous sedimentary records. We present a quantitative reconstruction of western Saharan precipitation derived from leaf wax isotopes in marine sediments. Our data indicate that the Green Sahara extended to 31°N and likely ended abruptly. We find evidence for a prolonged “pause” in Green Sahara conditions 8000 years ago, coincident with a temporary abandonment of occupational sites by Neolithic humans. The rainfall rates inferred from our data are best explained by strong vegetation and dust feedbacks; without these mechanisms, climate models systematically fail to reproduce the Green Sahara. This study suggests that accurate simulations of future climate change in the Sahara and Sahel will require improvements in our ability to simulate vegetation and dust feedbacks.
Click to expand...
That 5,000 years agrees with the end of the "Green Sahara" period. Whatever made "Green Sahara" may also have made "Green Australia". Australia's desert covers roughly the same range of latitudes as the Sahara, though on the opposite side of the Equator, and both deserts are the result of large-scale atmospheric circulation. So whatever might have made the Sahara less dry would likely have made Australia less dry. I'd have to look for Australia paleoclimate research.
 
Take care when guessing a language family's origin from the present location of its speakers. Algonquin was common in the Northeast U.S. when Europeans arrived, but probably originated far to the West since Blackfoot is its most divergent member. Similarly Dravidian is common in Southern India but probably originated far from there. Part of the evidence for that is that Brahui, found in Pakistan, is the family's most divergent member. Basque's distant ancestral language didn't come from northern Spain; instead it survived there because of the relative isolation of that mountainous region. Similarly, Caucasian language families need not have originated in the Caucasus Mountains.

Prof. Merritt Ruhlen divides all the world's languages into 12 families:
Kartvelian
Dravidian
Amerindian
Niger-Kordofanian (Niger-Congo)
Eurasiatic
Australian
Afro-Asiatic
Dene-Caucasian
Nilo-Saharan
Austric
Indo-Pacific
Khoisan​
Ruhlen isn't afraid to posit even larger macro-families, with all languages ultimately descended from a single proto-language — indeed he provides such a speculative language tree in his 26 year-old book — but it makes sense to "draw a line" somewhere.

I've listed the 12 language families very roughly by decreasing certainty: Kartvelian (aka South Caucasian) is a tiny language family devoid of any controversy. Dravidian Proper is a large but non-controversial family; I think the combination of Dravidian Proper and Brahui to form Dravidian is well accepted. At the other end, Khoisan, at least when Hatsa and Sandawe languages are included, is regarded by many as a paraphyletic grouping of languages which all happen to use click-sounds; and Indo-Pacific is a loose aggregation of little-studied languages.

The farther back in time we go, and the looser the language macro-families become, the harder it is IMO to derive interesting conclusions about pre-history.

Some speculations I find interesting are:
  • The original homeland of Dravidian is a mystery. Snake worship is a part of Dravidian culture leading some to imagine an exodus from Egypt!
  • Within Austric, Austronesian and Daic are especially close. This has led some to posit a migration from the Philippines back to the mainland, with proto-Daic drastically influenced by mainland languages like Chinese.
  • Prof. Dixon argues that Australian forms a distinct family NOT because the Australian languages all share a recent genetic ancestor, but for the opposite reason! The Australian languages are so ancient that their long-ago alignment into genetic groups has been rendered invisible; instead borrowings and Sprachbunds over hundreds of centuries have created a single large, if fuzzy, family.
  • Roger Blench claims that the entire Niger-Congo family is a branch within the Central Sudanic branch of Nilo-Saharan.
  • I show Amerindian as the 3rd most certain of the 12 families; ahead of Niger-Congo where some question the affiliation of Kordofanian with Niger-Congo proper.
As an interested layman observing the authorities debate, I sometimes feel that the quality of debate by so-called experts becomes a more interesting topic than the subject of the debate! (A few weeks ago I started a thread in Miscellaneous on another such controversy.) The evidence that Amerindian is a single language family is very strong; Sapir and Greenberg — the two greatest historical linguists ever — regarded it as clear-cut. Google-search for excerpts from the anti-Amerindian papers: you can almost feel the spittle fly as these professors lose their objectivity in some strange fear or hatred. (There is a Wiki on Amerind languages.)
 
I don't think most people are "enraged" at Edward Sapir or Joseph Greenberg! The field was very different when they were doing most of their work. Indeed, Sapir's vigorous documentation of the North American languages gave us a hefty portion of our data set. But it is in the nature of the sciences for theory to change and evolve as new facts come to light and old guiding paradigms transmute to new ones. I can see where debates and academic politics can seem off-putting or even ridiculous to the interested layman, but mutual critique and review are actually a very important part of the scientific process by which we improve our theories over time.
 
Turning to New Guinea, not much work has been done on the  Papuan languages. "Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by the comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughly Trans–New Guinea, West, North, East, and South Papuan languages)" I've found  Proto-Trans–New Guinea language but not much else. Joseph Greenberg has suggested "Indo-Pacific" for the Andaman Islands, New Guinea, and Tasmania, though not Australia, but that is not very widely accepted.


So we have one region remaining: Africa south of the Sahara Desert. This the place where humanity originated, where our present human species emerged from an earlier species. Joseph Greenberg's macro-classification here is generally accepted, unlike his macro-classifications for other places. He proposed four macrofamilies:
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Niger-Congo
  • Nilo-Saharan
  • Khoisan
This is rather unlike what one might expect from humanity emerging there -- Africans' languages falling into numerous families with no clear relationship between them. Like what we find in New Guinea, but on a larger scale. So let us take a closer look at the three macrofamilies that I have not discussed yet.
 
First,  Niger–Congo languages sometimes called Niger-Kordofanian ones.

It is something of a hand-wave, it must be conceded. Its highest-level split is between the  Atlantic–Congo languages and some languages in West Africa, mostly "Far West" Africa: Ijo, Dogon, Mande, Katla, and Rashad. Mande, especially, is only doubtfully related to the rest of Niger-Congo.

Turning to Atlantic-Congo, its genetic unity is generally accepted. It is composed of  Volta–Congo languages and some Far-West "Atlantic" languages.

In turn, Volta-Congo is composed of  Benue–Congo languages and several West African languages, like Volta-Niger langs Igbo and Yoruba, and the North-Central Zande langs.

The Benue-Congo langs extend only a tiny bit west of the Central-Southern-Africa Atlantic coast. Wiktionary lists Appendix:Proto-Benue-Congo reconstructions - Wiktionary and notes a book, The Noun-Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo | De Gruyter

I checked that Wiktionary pages, and the two sets of reconstructions differ almost completely. The first style is from de Wolf 1971, and the second style from Blench 2004.
belly *-bumu
belly *-mani
20. #-koo belly

buffalo *-zati
buffalo *-poŋ
145. #(n)-(g)yati buffalo

egg *-kiŋ, *-tiŋ
4. #eje egg

headpad *-kata
12. ekãta head-pad

salt *-nunu
salt *-mu
307. #mana salt

scorpion *-nan
scorpion *-get
15. #keNkere scorpion

water *-izi (±)
water *-ni (±)
218. #-mbal- water
Click to expand...
 
The Benue-Congo langs contain the Cross-River ones of Nigeria and nearby, and the  Bantoid languages. Those are in turn divided into  Northern Bantoid languages and  Southern Bantoid languages, and the latter contains the  Bantu languages The non-Bantu Bantoid languages are a tiny sliver on the northwest end of the total distribution.

The Bantu languages are spoken over much of central and southern Africa, and they are very recognizably related. A  Proto-Bantu language has been reconstructed with some success. The Bantu languages have several noun classes marked out with prefixes, and Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as also having them. The classes are marked out with prefixes, with singular and plural ones unpredictably different, and they are used for both adjective and verb agreement.

Appendix:Swahili noun classes - Wiktionary

Examples:

Watu wazuri wawili wale wameanguka (watu = people; -zuri = good; -wili = two; -le = those; -anguka = fall down)
Kenya (“Kenya”) → Mkenya (“Kenyan”)
-gonjwa (“sick”) → mgonjwa (“sick person”)
tende (“date”) → mtende (“date palm”)
Uingereza (“England”) → Kiingereza (“English”)
-baya (“bad”) → ubaya (“badness”)
-Ganda (“Ganda”) → Uganda (“Uganda”)
Kristo (“Christ”) → Ukristo (“Christianity”)
-soma (“read”) → kusoma (“reading; to read”)

Also
Kiswahili ("Swahili language") - Waswahili("Swahili people")
 
So we get a picture of speakers of Proto-Niger-Congo living in Far-West Africa and inventing agriculture. They slowly spread eastward, and when they reach what's now Cameroon, they start spreading much faster.

 Proto-Bantu language,  Bantu expansion - the Proto-Bantu speakers likely lived some 3,500 - 4,000 years ago (1,500 - 2,000 BCE) in Cameroon. They then spread eastward to the Pacific coast, then southward into southern Africa. Some of them went southward along the Atlantic coast to southern Africa.

Thus, Africa's Holocene prehistory resembles that of Europe and the Pacific islands, where a population of farmers spread over a large land area, mixing with and displacing the people already present. While that is evident from the language history of Africa (Niger-Congo) and the Pacific islands (Austronesian), it is much less apparent in Europe, because a later migration came along and erased most of the earlier one's linguistic evidence. There is a little bit that survives, like various words for "goat", "sheep", "rye", "barley", "chickpea", and the like.


That Sahara wet period was the  African humid period - roughly 14,500 years ago to 5,500 years ago. Afro-Asiatic speakers would have had an easier time spreading during it than today.


 Nilo-Saharan languages is not very strongly supported. "Nilo-Saharan languages present great differences, being a highly diversified group. It has proven difficult to reconstruct many aspects of Proto-Nilo-Saharan. Two very different reconstructions of the proto-language have been proposed by Lionel Bender and Christopher Ehret."


 Khoisan languages - they share click consonants, but not much else. It has three families, Khoe-Kwadi, Kx'a, and Tuu, and two isolates, Hadza and Sandawe, with very little evidence of relationship.

Some Southern African Bantu languages have also have clicks, but they may have been borrowed from local Khoisan speakers.
 
 Sub-Saharan Africa is Africa south of the Sahara Desert. From "Genetic history",
In addition, whole genome sequencing analysis of modern populations inhabiting sub-Saharan Africa has observed several primary inferred ancestry components: a Pygmy-related component carried by the Mbuti and Biaka Pygmies in Central Africa, a Khoisan-related component carried by Khoisan-speaking populations in Southern Africa, a Niger-Congo-related component carried by Niger-Congo-speaking populations throughout sub-Saharan Africa, a Nilo-Saharan-related component carried by Nilo-Saharan-speaking populations in the Nile Valley and African Great Lakes, and a West Eurasian-related component carried by Afroasiatic-speaking populations in the Horn of Africa and Nile Valley.
Click to expand...
noting
Early Back-to-Africa Migration into the Horn of Africa
The genetics of East African populations: a Nilo-Saharan component in the African genetic landscape | Scientific Reports

Pygmies themselves nowadays speak Bantu languages, so they can't provide much linguistic evidence.
 
Politesse said:
... I can see where debates and academic politics can seem off-putting or even ridiculous to the interested layman, but mutual critique and review are actually a very important part of the scientific process by which we improve our theories over time.
Click to expand...

I'm not alone in finding Ruhlen's critics overly shrill. Michael Witzel, distinguished Harvard Professor and President of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory since 1999 writes:

Michael Witzel said:
Another Severe Attack on Ruhlen

Some linguists criticized me last year for being too harsh in some of my comments on linguists. I said I was sorry. But now, good colleagues one and all can read something very very harsh from the other side. Even Lyle Campbell and Ives Goddard are pussycats compared to some of the critics of Greenberg, and more recently Ruhlen.

Get a copy of Anthony Grant's review of Merritt Ruhlen's On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy, 1994 which appears in Anthropological Linguistics 37, number 1, 1995,93-96. After reading that piece of academic Schadenfreude, no one will ever again accuse me or Lyle Campbell of being harsh. By the way, that journal (AL) seems to have joined Language and IJAL in being totally biased. Like the three famous monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil -- where the Amerind theory is evil incarnate, in the body of Joe Greenberg. Heavens!
Click to expand...

I'd post more examples, but paywalls are popping up everywhere.
 
The best-known of the Bantu languages is Swahili, an East African language widely learned there as a second language.
Here are some others. I've listed those that have grammar descriptions in Wikipedia:
 Proto-Bantu language lists the reconstructed noun classes:
  • 1 *mu- human being, animate
  • 2 *ba- (plural of 1)
  • 3 *mu- plant, natural force, body part, inanimate
  • 4 *mi- (plural of 3)
  • 5 *li- (various)
  • 6 *ma- (plural of 5), liquids (mass nouns)
  • 7 *ki- various, tools, diminutives, manner/way/language
  • 8 *bi- (plural of 7)
  • 9 *n- animals, inanimate
  • 10 *din- (plural of 9, 11)
  • 11 *lu- abstractions, things with extended outline shapes, various
  • 12 *ka- diminutives
  • 13 *tu- (plural of 12)
  • 14 *bu- abstractions
  • 15 *ku- infinitive / gerund of verb ("-ing")
  • 16 *pa- location on (proximal, exact)
  • 17 *ku- location at (distal, approximate)
  • 18 *mu- location in (interior)
  • 19 *pi- diminutive
There are possible additional ones, like *ghi- augmentative (big version of something).
 
To that list of Bantu languages I add  Bemba language,  Luganda,  Kinyarwanda (all (East) Central African),  Herero language,  Otjiherero grammar (Southwest African)

Hendrikse and Poulos have proposed this sequence of semantics:
  • 1/2, 3/4, 9/10 -- nouns - concreteness (five senses)
  • 5/6, 7/8, 11
  • 12/13, 19, 20, 21, 22 -- adjective-like nouns - attribution (two senses)
  • -
  • 16, 17, 18, 23 - adverb-like nouns - spatial orientation (one sense)
  • 14
  • 15 -- verb-like nouns - abstractness (no sense)
In addition to the 1-19 I'd earlier listed, some linguists have proposed 20 *ghu- putative, 21 *ghi- augmentative, 22 (?), 23 *i- locative

The noun-class prefixes are used for adjective agreement and as subject and object prefixes for verbs. Pronouns also have prefix forms for verbs.

I couldn't find much more about Proto-Bantu grammar in the Wiki article -- it mostly discussed the noun classes and their prefixes.

I looked elsewhere, and I've found Did the Proto-Bantu verb have a Synthetic or an Analytic Structure? - lots of separate words or mashed together to form one big word?

Author Derek Nurse concludes that Proto-Bantu verbs were on the synthetic side, much like most present-day Bantu languages, like Swahili. He also concludes that Proto-Niger-Congo verbs were on the analytic side, much like many present-day West African languages. But he doesn't go into a lot of detail about what can be reconstructed.

Reconstructing the Proto-Bantu Verbal Unit: Internal Evidence - author Larry Hyman notes Achille Meussen's reconstruction:

Verbal Unit = (pre-stem) + (stem)

The stem part is generally accepted:
(verb root) + (optional extension) + (inflectional final vowel)

The pre-stem part is less generally accepted, but according to AM:
Pre-stem = (pre-initial) + (subject) + (negative) + (tense) + (formative) + (object)

He argues that the subject and the object were already prefixes in Proto-Bantu, though he is unsure about the rest. Some tense markers likely originated from auxiliary verbs, for instance.
 
 Bantu languages -  Proto-Bantu language


Superfamilies:
 Southern Bantoid languages (  Northern Bantoid languages )
 Bantoid languages

Non-Bantu Bantoid is mainly at the southern Nigeria-Cameroon border, while Bantu is over a much larger area.

Reconstructing Benue-Congo Person Marking I. Proto-Bantoid

Bantu personal pronouns:
  • subject pronoun / verb prefix
  • object pronoun / verb affix
  • possessive pronoun / noun or verb suffix
  • independent stressed (emphatic) subject pronoun
Reconstructed Proto-Bantu:
  • 1s: subject prefix *nyi-, non-subject *(a)me, independent *(i)me
  • 2s: subject prefix *v-, object affix *-kv-, possessive *(a)we, independent *(i)we
  • 1p: subject prefix *tv-, non-subject *ac(u)e, independent *(be)c(u)e / *ic(u)e
  • 2p: subject prefix *mv-, non-subject *an(u)e, independent *(be)n(u)e / *in(u)e
Reconstructed Proto-Bantoid:
  • 1s: subject prefix *nyi-, non-subject+independent *(a)me
  • 2s: subject prefix *v-, non-subject+independent *(a)we
  • 1p: subject prefix *tv-, non-subject+independent *(be)c(u)e
  • 2p: subject prefix *mv-, non-subject+independent *(be)n(u)e
 
Going back further with Bantu < Bantoid:
 Benue–Congo languages
Going further into Nigeria.

Proto-Benue-Congo word list - Voorhoeve, Jan and Paul P. de Wolf. Benue-Congo noun class systems. Leiden: West African Linguistic Society, Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1969

Repeated in Appendix:Proto-Benue-Congo reconstructions - Wiktionary without the noun classes

I'll list them:
  • *a SC 2
  • *bi SC 1
  • *bu SC 4 - abstractions (Bantu 14)
  • *bu/*a 8
  • *bu/*í 8
  • *ì SC 5
  • *ì/*í 41 - animals, some inanimate (Bantu 9)
  • *ka SC 2
  • *ka/*í 3
  • *ka/*ti 1
  • *ki/*a 2
  • *ki/*bi 18 - inanimate, some body parts, some animals (Bantu 7, 8)
  • *ku/*a 16
  • *ku/*í 7 - body parts
  • *li SC 6
  • *li/*a 44 - body parts (Bantu 5)
  • *lu*í 2
  • *ma SC 12 - liquids (Bantu 6)
  • *ù/*ba 24 - human beings (Bantu 1, 2)
  • *ú/*í 15
  • *ú/*ti 10
All of them are of inanimate objects in general unless indicated otherwise. Some of them are recognizable as Bantu ones.
 
 Volta–Congo languages (  Volta–Niger languages )
On the west, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and extending eastward, including a strip north of the Bantu reginon.

The Volta-Niger subgroup contains Igbo (Ibo) and Yoruba, two languages of Nigeria.

Neither language has noun classes, though Yoruba has different interrogative pronouns for human vs. nonhuman: "ta ni" ("who?") and "ki ni" ("what?"). Or more generally, reasoning vs. nonreasoning.


 Atlantic–Congo languages
On the west coast of Africa: Senegal to Liberia, also some spots to the north.

Then finally,
 Niger–Congo languages
It covers the remaining bits of West Africa, inland of Senegal-Liberia.

That article lists it as "hypothetical", and it has a question for after every branch but Atlantic-Congo, branches like Mande and Dogon.

It also has (noun classes) for Atlantic-Congo.
 
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