Bibliographic record
Abstract
Economic mechanisms behind the emergence of ancient Sumer remain unavoidably speculative and should benefit from a better understanding of their environmental context. Abundance sustaining increased social complexity during the Uruk period (c. 6,000-5,200 y BP) has been traditionally ascribed to pastoralism, trade, and/or resource diversity. However, contemporary agricultural surpluses are hard to explain before adoption of large-scale irrigation systems. Here we use high-resolution satellite-based topography and paleoenvironmental proxies from a new drill core at Lagash/Tell Al Hiba, together with previous geological and archaeological data, to reconstruct the morphodynamic evolution of coastal Sumer. We propose that tidal irrigation offers a plausible jumpstarting mechanism for high-yield, diversified agriculture providing an impetus for urbanization. As access to sea was restricted by delta build-up and tides shifted with the advancing deltaic coast, intensified reliance on mercurial river regimes eventually led to the expansive fluvial irrigation network of Early Dynastic city-states. By positioning coastal morphodynamics as a pivotal factor in urbanization and political ecology, we underscore the intricate interconnections between naturally evolving systems and collective human agency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".