So why append a post to this thread?

Because, on a thread about a present-day refugee crisis,
an assertion was made that

"Arabs have had a presence in Algeria since 4000 BC ."

Am I the only one who wonders what went wrong where in that assertion?

We could look at around 4000 BC ,
south of the Mediterranean,
and be reminded that
the Nile Valley was just getting the foundation for
an empire of Egyptian Pharoahs in place.

But then, just because Algeria and the River Nile are
both in the northernmost part of the African continent,
why confuse the two?
Were the Pharaohs of the Nile Valley
even remotely interested in what is today Algeria?

And why confuse the pharaonic Egyptians with Arabs?

Or Arabs with the ancestors of the Berbers/Kabyles/Amazigh?

In 4000 BC I do not doubt that Semitic languages existed in some form, and I would be surprised
if the Semitic language group,
in which both Hebrew and Arabic have their origins,
did not have some really ancient preserved examples,
whether they be scrolls, tablets, or what have you.

I just wonder if Arabs were even Arabs as long ago as 4000 BC,
be it in the Saudi peninsula
or in the North African Maghreb.

Were they, rather, Bedouins?
If you know even a surface scratch's worth about Arabic
then probably it is more than I know, however
I do recall this much:
that the actual word
"arab" in its language of origin
means a human collective that is a non-nomadic settlement,
of which each human individual member
is either an "araby" or an "arabiyyah" depending upon gender.
Suggesting that the individual is a fragment of a greater whole.
In the language of origin, you do not call an individual human being an Arab:
"arab" means the entire settlement, a collective entity.

"Arab" therefore implies that, while its ancestors
might have been nomadic Bedouins,
the members of an "arab" base their form of civilized society
upon staying in one spot and giving up a nomadic existence.

In 4000 BC, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
were the coastal lands well to the west of the Nile Valley,
and their mountains,
and their part of the Sahara,
inhabited by people whose language was Semitic in origin?
Sure there is cave art in North Africa from that far back,
however, how do you make its creators out to be Arabs?

This is not an aliens-from-outer-space deal here,
although it looks as though this thread tended that way at first.

Yes, the word "Semitic" comes from "Shem," one of Noah's sons
in the Book of Genesis;
and yes, what is now called the Afroasiatic language family
was hypothesized by a Hebrew-speaking grammarian, in Algeria,
in the 9th century AD
(Judah ibn Quraysh, commenting on
connections between the Berber languages and the Semitic languages),
but still ...
4000 BC?

Okay, thanks for letting me get that out of my system.