"Christopher Ehret was a historian who dedicated his career to the study of Africa’s ancient past at a time when few Americans in his profession did so. Over a career that extended across six decades, he produced a formidable body of material on the early history and historical linguistics of the continent. This book serves as a culmination of his work, providing a concise and highly accessible summary of the scholarship in a field to which he made his own considerable contribution.

Summarizing the early history of Africa in little more than two hundred pages is no easy feat, and like a magician Ehret only makes the feat even more challenging by expanding the scope of his book thousands of years into the prehistoric era. Doing so brings more easily into focus many of the long-term trends that he sees shaping the history not just of Africa but of the world itself. As he notes at the start of his book world history was African history up to that point, with the ancestors of modern humanity setting out less than 50,000 years ago. Whereas most histories of the ancient world let sub-Saharan Africa recede from view after this, Ehret rejects this by describing the ways African populations remained at the forefront of human development, most notably in terms of agricultural and technological innovation that was often in advance of such innovations elsewhere.

Ehret also pushes back against the idea of sub-Saharan Africans being isolated from developments elsewhere by describing the commercial exchanges that have been identified throughout the continent. He even argues that such exchanges contributed to the emergence of ancient Egyptian civilization, seeing it as shaped more by African influences than by ones from the Mediterranean basin. While some may dismiss such claims as a reflection of his passion for his subject � one that shines through on nearly every page � he grounds his arguments in the growing scholarship of his subject. Yet this is far from a dry work of academia, but a sweeping and energetic study of his subject. Anyone seeking to better appreciate the early history of Africa and its contribution to world history would be hard pressed to find a better introduction to the field."

Zara is 16% done with This Is How You Lose the Time War