Ehret's account of Africa before 300 CE rests on an insistence that whatever human beings did in the past is history, with no line dividing it from something called prehistory. Combining archaeology, historical linguistics, comparative ethnography and genetic evidence, he builds a case that Africans led or matched the rest of the world in the early transitions. Chapters take up ceramic technology and the women likely responsible for it, metallurgy developed within the continent, agriculture invented there independently and African crops and the donkey carried outward to other regions, and commercial revolutions in West Africa and the Congo basin that raised towns and long-distance trade. Another chapter gathers four decades of excavation and linguistic work to argue for the African foundations of ancient Egypt. A closing chapter reorganises early world history into five periods so that Africa enters the narrative as an ordinary participant rather than an appendix.