2000s CE: (Centering Culture and Society — Ehret’s Call for a New Historiographical Framework That Centers Each Historical Age on How Peoples Around the Worl…

2000s CE: (Centering Culture and Society — Ehret’s Call for a New Historiographical Framework That Centers Each Historical Age on How Peoples Around the World Readapted Their Lives, Activities, Social Relations, Religious Beliefs, and Material Culture to Changing Circumstances, Integrating Africa and the Peoples of Boreal Eurasia, the Americas, and Oceania as Integral Actors in the Human Story): How should we organize our history-telling so that each chapter, as we move forward in time, fully accounts for developments on the African continent and integrates them into our broader syntheses of history around the globe? In Ancient Africa: A Global History, Ehret proposes centering stories on culture and society — exploring the variety of ways people around the world, over each succeeding historical age, readapted their lives, activities, social relations, religious beliefs, and material culture to cope with the changing circumstances of the world around them. This is not merely a methodological preference but a radical reorientation that dissolves the very boundaries enabling African exclusion. When history is organized around civilizational achievements attributed to discrete centers — Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, China — Africa can always be declared peripheral. But when the organizing principle is the universal human process of cultural adaptation, Africa cannot be excluded without excluding humanity itself. The approach offers historians new pathways for bringing in, as integral actors in the overall human story, not only Africa and Africans but the peoples of boreal Eurasia, the Americas, the islands of South Asia, and Oceania — all those whom the Eurocentric paradigm has consigned to the margins.