Chapter 4 investigates the major social and ecological transitions during the late third millennium BCE, when climatological crisis and expansion of pastoralism and metallurgy lead to accelerated cultural, technological, and political changes, as well as the increased interactions connecting East, Middle, and North Asian communities. With the collapse of coastal centers, the shift of political theater to the highland basins and the loess plateau was critical for the eventual rise of the Central Plains-centered political order during the second millennium BCE. I argue that the unprecedented convergence of technologies from diverse sources in newly emerged Longshan centers was the immediate source of a repertoire of knowledge that eventually became the foundation for the Sandai civilization. The introduction of metallurgy and the prospecting activities associated with its incipient development of metallurgy created a new type of knowledge critical to the metal-based conception of political landscape assumed in the wending narrative.