2000s CE: (Against Prehistory — Ehret’s Rejection of the Artificial Division of the Human Story into History and Prehistory, the Term Prehistory as a Eurocen…

2000s CE: (Against Prehistory — Ehret’s Rejection of the Artificial Division of the Human Story into History and Prehistory, the Term Prehistory as a Eurocentric Construct Privileging Written Records Over All Other Forms of Human Knowledge and Memory, and the Implications for How We Understand African and Indigenous Societies Whose Pasts Were Transmitted Through Oral, Material, and Linguistic Evidence): Ehret sees no value in the artificial separation of the human story into something called history and something else called prehistory. The division is not innocent — it is a Eurocentric construct that privileges written records as the sole legitimate form of historical knowledge, thereby consigning to a lesser category every society whose past was transmitted through oral tradition, material culture, linguistic evidence, and other forms of memory that are no less rigorous for being different. The term prehistory was coined in a world that assumed literate European civilization to be the standard against which all others were measured — societies without writing were deemed to exist before history, in a temporal darkness that only the arrival of European documentation could illuminate. For Africa, this framework is especially pernicious: it relegates the vast majority of the continent’s past — tens of thousands of years of innovation, migration, state-building, artistic achievement, and philosophical development — to a category whose very name implies it does not count as real history. Whatever human beings have done, wherever they have done it, constitutes history. The abolition of the term prehistory is not a semantic quibble but an act of epistemological justice.