There is at least one, Charlene McBride, author of Sketchnote handbook. We might wonder why, since everyone started with the same Twitter thread, why some found her and some didn’t.

Going through all the trees, I was very curious who found one woman, who found none and who found two or more. I think only a couple found Charlene (I feel grateful to call her friend, so maybe it’s easier for me to see her?)

So why are the stories told like this? And why are people skipped over? We’ll be hitting erasure before this quarter is over, believe me.

Of course, all visual thinking started not in Lascaux, but in Africa. And Egyptian as well as Mayan cultures made it a more formal vocabulary. And even though this essay is in our publication, no one cited the Mayans.

I don’t have answers but I do have hypothesis: our long European history is eager to dismiss other cultures as primitive, the European ancestors (greco-roman) are ground breaking, and we are so taught to see white men and ignore women and people of color that it is unconscious, even by those most effected by it. Sometimes I think the Celts have gotten a better shake then say, the Aztecs. Yet they and many Asian cultures had zero way before Europeans learned about it in the middle east.

In order to set the record straight, we have to dig deeper beyond the obvious. But in our overloaded hurried lives, who will go beyond the obvious? I hope it’s you. All of you.