50,000 BCE–300 CE: (Planting Your Feet in Africa, the Problem of Perspective in World History: Africa Treated as Peripheral Because Historians Have Not Perfo…

50,000 BCE–300 CE: (Planting Your Feet in Africa, the Problem of Perspective in World History: Africa Treated as Peripheral Because Historians Have Not Performed the Necessary Exercise of Standing in the Middle of the Continent and Looking Outward, the Paths of Historical Change Within Africa Paralleling and Integrally Feeding into Wider Global Networks from the Holocene Onward, and Globalization Going Back Thousands of Years with Africa Fully Linked from the Beginning): From the beginning of the spread, fifty thousand or more years ago, of the fully modern human ancestors of all of us out of eastern Africa, the paths of historical change within the continent paralleled and, especially from the early and middle Holocene onward, integrally fed into wider global networks of change taking place across the African-Eurasian macrocontinent. Globalization in its strongest forms may be a phenomenon of recent centuries, but its earliest manifestations go back thousands of years, and the African continent was fully linked into those wider emerging trends from the start. Then Ehret names a problem so obvious it is almost embarrassing that it needs to be said: Africa gets treated as peripheral because historians have not performed the simple, informative, and necessary exercise of planting their feet, metaphorically, in the middle of the African continent and looking outward from there at the long-term courses of historical change. Even historians of Africa based outside the continent have too often failed to do this. The problem is not a lack of evidence. The problem is a lack of imagination, or more precisely, a surfeit of the wrong kind of imagination: the kind that always places Europe at the center and everything else at the edges. Stand in the middle of Africa and look outward, and the entire shape of world history changes. The connections that seemed marginal suddenly look foundational. The developments that seemed derivative suddenly look original. The continent that seemed peripheral turns out to have been, all along, at the center of the story.