50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (Chapter 6: Africa and Africans in Early Global History — Returning to the Foundational Question of How to More Fully Integrate Africa an…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (Chapter 6: Africa and Africans in Early Global History — Returning to the Foundational Question of How to More Fully Integrate Africa and Africans into Global Histories of Humankind, the Answer Being to Center Stories on Human Culture and Society Rather Than Wars Kings and Political History, Giving Incidental Rather Than Primary Attention to Political Narrative and Instead Foregrounding the Varied Ways People Constructed Their Understandings and Beliefs, Structured Their Social and Gender Relations, and Made Their Technological and Material Responses to the Challenges of Different Eras): Chapter 6 of Ancient Africa: A Global History returns to the foundational question that Chapter 1 posed: how do we more fully integrate Africa and Africans into our global histories of humankind? For an answer it offered another question: what if we centered our stories on human culture and society? This sort of approach — in giving incidental rather than primary attention to wars, kings, and political history — allows us to foreground the varied ways, over the long span of millennia BCE, that our human kin around the globe constructed their understandings and beliefs about their place in the world and how to deal with it. It focuses our attention on the similarly varied ways people around the world structured their social and gender relations, as well as on the separate, and often parallel, transitions they followed in their technological and material responses to the challenges they faced in different eras. For the Holocene epoch it gives central attention to all the different, independent transformations of basic subsistence practices and techniques that people in distant parts of the world brought into being; to the growth of new scales of residential and political relations in many different regions during the later millennia of the Holocene; and, for the last two millennia BCE in particular, to the rise of new kinds of exchange relations and to the rippling out of the social, cultural, political, and communicational consequences of those developments more and more widely across the African-Eurasian portion of the world. This is the methodological manifesto that has governed the entire book, now restated as a summation. The conventional framework of world history — organized around empires, battles, and the rise and fall of political units — is a framework that structurally excludes Africa, because Africa’s contributions to world history were overwhelmingly in the domains of culture, technology, subsistence, and social organization rather than in the domain of political narrative that the Western academy privileges. Change the framework, and Africa moves from the margins to the center. That is what Ehret has done, and Chapter 6 is his accounting of the result.