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An excellent post, as always! Your post hints at the key differences between flood irrigation agriculture and. plow agriculture. When it comes to the mysteries of Çatalhöyük, the introduction of the iron plow may have transformed their more egalitarian flood farming society to hierarchal plow farming, which, as you mentioned, requires land ownership and partitioned land. Also, planting went from "women's work" of sowing the ground to "man's work" working cattle and plows. I wish I could find the sources, but I've read several articles about this dynamic.

Do we understand why it took so long for humans to discover metallurgy? I know iron smelting requires more advanced technology, but bronze shouldn't have taken as long as it should have, intuition would say.

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