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The Deep Map is a weekly podcast that explores the hidden religious and cultural forces driving headlines in the Near East and around the world. Your host, Robert Nicholson, founder and president of The Philos Project, takes on a new topic each month, peeling back the layers of world events in dialogue with a wide range of guests, looking for answers and challenging his own beliefs along the way.

What does it mean to be a "free woman" in the ancient Mediterranean world? Listen in as our guest, Dr. Stephanie Budin, joins Chelsea and Melissa to discuss women who lived outside of the traditional confines of the patriarchy and who were not under the direct control of a man. Dr. Budin, a historian and expert in ancient religion and sexuality, tells us about "harimatu" in ancient Mesopotamia and refutes the idea that these free women were prostitutes. This episode has it all: sex, gender-bending legal documents, and the dismantling of patriarchal assumptions about women's freedom and the origins of prostitution.

In which we go on an extended exploration of causal reasoning, language, and how they relate to innovation, social learning, Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, and the future course of Near Eastern prehistory. Also, in which you can hear my dog in the background multiple times.

Following the titanic shifts in climate brought on by the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, the Near East is entering an uncertain new phase. This new phase will bring unprecedented changes to hominins, and will culminate in, among other things, the appearance of the human species. The path we will take to reach that point is illustrated at the Levantine site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, one of the most fascinating and archaeologically-dense sites we'll ever encounter. Here we find an endless list of historical "firsts", but far more importantly, the changes to the hominin mind which made those firsts possible.

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