50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (What Africa Forces Us to Rethink, the Long-Term Courses of African History Challenging Common Assumptions About Where and When Early Tec…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (What Africa Forces Us to Rethink, the Long-Term Courses of African History Challenging Common Assumptions About Where and When Early Technological Transitions Originated, Where the Varied Transitions from Foraging to Agriculture Took Shape, Where Long-Distance Commerce First Linked Distant Regions, and What Early Social History, Religious Evolution, Gender Relations, and Political Formation Actually Looked Like Across the Ancient World): Most of all, the long-term courses of history in Africa challenge us to rethink our understandings of how history unfolded in other regions around the globe. This is not a gentle suggestion. Ehret is saying, plainly, that common assumptions about major connective themes in ancient world history are wrong because they were formulated without African evidence. Where and when did notable early technological transitions actually originate and spread? The answers change when you include Africa. Where and when did the varied transitions from foraging to agriculture take shape? The answers change when you include Africa. Where and when did long-distance commerce first begin to link distant regions? Same story. And the rethinking does not stop at economics and technology. It reaches into ancient social history, the evolution of early religious belief systems, gender and how it played out in the social and political relations of those times, and the varied ways that institutions and organizing beliefs of early, small-scale human societies were both co-opted and transformed in the emerging complex and stratified societies of the later ancient periods. Every question changes when Africa enters the room.