This plea for a history of prehistoric and protohistoric settlement of the Sahel region includes five stages and it aims at 1) presenting the state of knowledge on the languages of the region under study and examining whether it is possible to date more accurately the individualization of the various language families that compose the identified phyla; 2) establishing distinct correlations between the genetic approach developed by Petr Triska and colleagues (2015) and the selected linguistic families in order to investigate whether a chronological order can be determined; 3) analyzing the archaeological data that make it possible to substantiate the correlations established between linguistic and genetic data and to consolidate the proposed temporal framework; 4) reconsidering the history of the different phyla based on the genetic data; 5) proposing a history of settlement taking into account the possible decoupling between the spread of animal husbandry and population movements and, as regards these latter, distinct correlation with phases of climatic deterioration.