50,000+ BCE–Present: (The Corrective to Patriarchal Presumption, African Ceramic History Standing as a Challenge to the Unacknowledged Assumption of Male Age…

50,000+ BCE–Present: (The Corrective to Patriarchal Presumption, African Ceramic History Standing as a Challenge to the Unacknowledged Assumption of Male Agency in Technological Advance, the Danger of Reading Back into Pre-Urban and Pre-State Ages the Gender Roles That Several Thousand Years of Unequal and Authoritarian Societies Have Since Created, and the Need to Query Our Presumptions About Gender in All Areas of Culture Not Just Material Production): Ehret presses the gender point further. Five to six thousand years of patriarchal dominance right through the whole middle belt of the Eurasian landmass have left historians and the general public with an often-unacknowledged presumption: that men drive technological advance. The history of ceramic manufacture in Africa should stand as a great corrective to that presumption, and more broadly, a corrective to how we think about women and men in history. But Ehret goes beyond ceramics. He argues that we historians ought to be similarly querying our presumptions about the gender distributions of human agency in all areas of culture, not just material production. We should be very wary of reading back into pre-urban, pre-state ages the genderings of work and behavior that the intervening several thousand years of unequal and authoritarian societies brought into being. This is a point with enormous implications. If the conventional gendering of technological innovation is a product of the last five or six millennia rather than a reflection of some eternal human nature, then virtually everything we think we know about who invented what, and who did what kind of work in the deep past, needs to be reexamined from the ground up. The African evidence is not just adding a chapter to the story of technology. It is rewriting the story’s fundamental assumptions about who the protagonists were.