The Loess Plateau contains a critical flaw: the soil averages only 0.164 μg/g of Selenium. In many areas, it drops below the biological threshold for mammalian muscle health.
This created a "Horse Desert." Any cavalry horses bred in the heartland would succumb to Nutritional Myodegeneration (White Muscle Disease). Foals born to selenium-deficient dams would suffer heart failure or leg paralysis within 4-6 weeks.
IMPLICATION: China could never rely on "Biological Power" (Cavalry) for defense. They were geologically barred from the primary military technology of the ancient world.
Where biology failed, geology offered a substitute. The same earth that killed the horses was rich in the components for bronze.
The mythical figure of Chi You is described as having a "Bronze Head and Iron Forehead." This is not metaphor; it is a description of the technological pivot.
Men do not eat rocks. Machines do. Chi You represents the moment the civilization decided to "wear the mountain" because they could not "ride the horse." They became Lithophages (Stone Eaters) out of necessity.
The biblical record introduces metallurgy not as a gradual agrarian discovery, but as a rapid technological injection prior to the Flood.
Just as Chi You commanded an "Automaton Legion" of bronze and iron, Tubal-cain represents the kinetic leap into the Chaos Engine. It is the origin point of the human Lithophage—the moment man began actively mining, consuming, and weaponizing the earth's crust.
The metallurgical solution required imports. Analysis of Shang Dynasty bronzes reveals a Highly Radiogenic Lead (HRL) signature (206Pb/204Pb > 20).
This isotope signature does not match known Chinese ore bodies. It *does* match the ancient Archean cratons found in Southern Africa.
CONCLUSION: The "Red Dragon" has always been fed by the "Black Continent." The Genesis of the Chinese state was dependent on a long-distance material circuit that predates the Silk Road by millennia.