Somewhere in the eastern Sahara around 16,000 years ago, these two hunters scouting the dunes for wild game. The language they speak is Proto-Afrasan (or Proto-Afroasiatic), and it will give rise to an entire phylum of languages spoken across northern and eastern Africa as well as southwestern Eurasia. Examples of Afrasan languages include ancient Egyptian, Sudanese Beja, Somali, most of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, and the Berber and Semitic families (the latter of these having entered Asia sometime before 3750 BC).
The exact origin point of the Proto-Afrasan language remains unknown, but most likely it is somewhere in northeastern Africa, possibly either the eastern Sahara Desert or along the coast of the Red Sea. The dispersal of its speakers across Africa and into Eurasia would have been facilitated by the transformation of the Sahara from desert to grassy savanna between 14,000 and 5,500 years ago, during the terminal Pleistocene to early and mid-Holocene epochs.