Arabia benefits from the great Indian Ocean monsoons. The Sahara doesn't really have one now - but it used to. Less well known, the southern Hijaz also has seasonal downpours they call the Kharif. At the same time as the Sahara monsoons, the Earth was warm enough to rain more monsoon for Arabia, perhaps such that the Kharif could qualify as well. The blasted landscape of Rub' al-Khali then had a lake: so, Abdallah S. Zaki et al.
This ended around 3500 BC. Sumerians start reporting paraSemitic Akkadian a few centuries later, before they and the Eblaites write on their own. We read true Semitic maybe a millennium after that.
This lakebed cannot be the Urheimat of the whole Afro-Asiatic family, if it is a family. For one, Egyptian is already firmly lower-Nilotic. Also Berber could stem from the preSemitic language of the old "Natufian" Levant, maybe Chadic also. I wonder, rather, if this region be the Cushitic homeland, or if not then the core of EthioSemitic and Mehri before pushing Cushitic off the Arabia-Felix.
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