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Similarities between southern peninsular Arabic dialects and the Modern South Arabian languages support a southern pre-diaspora origin for the Arabic dialects negating and interrogating with reflexes of šī. Most share an existential particle analogous to the Arabic šī found in Yemeni, Omani, and Syrian varieties, at least, and Mehri possesses an indefinite determiner śi that functions exactly like the analogous Arabic šī. Southern Arabic speakers were probably in the Fertile Crescent as early as seven centuries before Islam and maybe twice that many, ample time for a southern Arabic feature to become established in the Levant. Current dialect distributions probably originate in the displacement of the old southern Arab Christian elite by Arabic-speaking Muslims from Central Arabia.

“Planetary health is primary; human well-being is derivative.” (T. Berry) This chapter demonstrates religious ethics in a new key. It does so by centering planetary health and by showing how human identity and well-being are bound, with every cell of the body, to ecospheric health. To illustrate this in detail, the chapter uses one of the primal elements—earth as soil. Attention to soil and its life demonstrates how the foci of the previous chapters—change, theory, community—appear when morality and ethics emerge from reflections on a primal element. This in turn illustrates the method of religious ethics in a new key. Special note is given to method as the way anyone and everyone structures his or her ethic. Method is what we think with as we think about moral matters. How do we think in ways that are Earth-honoring?

This chapter discusses the press in the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula. It did not have to undergo the long process of learning and adaptation as had its Egyptian and Lebanese predecessors. The few years of relative freedom prior to World War I permitted closer contact between writers from the different parts of the region. The dramatic political changes following the war, the cultural developments that occurred and the proliferations of newspapers accelerated the process of closing the linguistic gap. The press was able to shift to a fluent journalistic vocabulary quickly despite dramatic political changes following the war. The Arabic press had successfully met the dual challenge of an effective journalistic style and developed a functional vocabulary to serve it by the eve of World War II.

Details Blur As We peer back through millions of years, but the outline of the story is clear enough. During the past 2– 3 million years, our hominin forebears had to cope with an increasingly vari-able and cooling climate. Across those 100,000 Homo generations, survival and reproduction depended on maintaining biological and behavioral compatibility with constantly changing climatic and environmental conditions. Hence much of modern human biological versatility and adaptability, including several unique aspects of brain function, comes from evolution’s selective winnowing within those ancient predecessor populations. The genes of the survivors, those best able to reproduce, are part of our genetic inheritance today. That climate change has been a major source of natural selective pressure has long been known. Alfred Russel Wallace, the overshadowed younger contemporary of Charles Darwin and codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, wrote that, among the variations occurring in every fresh generation, survival of the fittest occurred in response to the “changes of climate, of food, of enemies always in progress.” The corollary, of course, is that since biological evolution must focus on surviving the present, oblivious of the future, it provides no guarantee against extinction. Even so, a multivalent brain that enables cultural and behavioral adaptability and strategic forward thinking would surely help an animal species cope better with subsequent environmental changes. Indeed, it seems to have worked sufficiently well for our Homo genus ancestors during two million years of ever-changing climatic conditions for at least one Homo species to have carried the baton of survival into the present. In the next two centuries, our species faces a new challenge of greater, faster, and protracted climate change. Since the Cambrian Explosion of new life forms around 540 million years ago, there have been five great natural extinctions and many lesser ones. The earliest extinction of multicellular life, though less destructive than its successors, occurred around 510 million years ago, apparently due to acute sulfurous shrouding, cooling, and oxygen deprivation caused by a massive volcanic eruption in northwest Australia. Most of these catastrophic transitions were marked by climate extremes, volcanic activity, and altered ocean chemistry, especially rapid surface acidification of shallow coastal waters.

In which natural history is proposed as the original science-important to early hunter-gatherers and farmers in the practical sense of getting food and preventing one from becoming food. An analogy is drawn to late-Contact Paiute and Washoe cultures. The formation of large, sedentary nation-states allowed a more theoretical natural history to develop, as exemplified by the Assyrian king Asurbanipal. Asurbanipal developed an extensive library that contained both literature and medical treatises-"herbals." The palace in Nineveh contained detailed depictions of plants and animals that suggest a serious interest in the natural world. He also created “paradises” that served as herbaria and as zoological gardens.

This chapter explores in greater depth the interpretative tools available to archaeologists interested in innovation and technological change. It begins with an extended discussion of the research history of early-agriculture studies and the various narratives and interpretative frameworks that have developed in this thriving field. Evolutionary approaches to innovation are discussed and found to be limited in their applicability because of their inability to grapple with the complexities of social relations and socially constructed technologies. Instead, the chapter argues that the most appropriate approach to the study of innovation, particularly when examining highly fragmented archaeological data, is through the application of social models that emphasize connections between persons and things, a relational approach foregrounding ideas of social construction, negotiation, and historic trajectories. This approach allows us to bring together complementary data and to work at multiple temporal and spatial scales to tell thick histories of innovation and resistance.

The origins and spread of agriculture and a Neolithic way of life marked a major turning point in the evolution of human society. Farming changed everything. Our heritage as food collectors, consuming the wild products of the earth, extends back millions of years. Nevertheless, at the end of the Pleistocene some human groups began to produce their own food rather than collect it, to domesticate and control wild plants and animals, achieving what is perhaps the most remarkable transformation in our entire human past. Agriculture is a way of obtaining food that involves domesticated plants and animals. But the transition to farming is much more than simple herding or cultivation. It also entails major, long-term changes in the structure and organization of the societies that adopt this new way of life, as well as a totally new relationship with the environment. Hunters and gatherers largely live off the land in an extensive fashion, generally exploiting diverse resources over a broad area; farmers intensively use a smaller portion of the landscape and create a milieu that suits their needs. With the transition to agriculture, humans began to truly change their environment. Cultivation of plants and herding of animals, village society, and pottery did not originate in Europe. Domestication arrived from the ancient Near East. The Neolithic began in southwest Asia some 11,000 years ago and eventually spread into the European continent, carried by expanding populations of farmers. The mountains of western Iran and southern Turkey and the uplands of the Levant (the coastal region of the far eastern part of the Mediterranean, from the northeastern Sinai Peninsula through modern Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, and west along the modern Turkish coast) form an elevated zone somewhat cooler and wetter than much of the Near East. The area has been described as the Fertile Crescent. A variety of wild plants grow in abundance. This region was the natural habitat of many of the wild ancestors of the first species of plants and animals to be domesticated at the end of the Pleistocene: the wild wheats and barleys, the wild legumes, and the wild sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle that began to be exploited in large numbers at the origins of agriculture.

The risk of disruptive climate change is real and immediate. A low- pressure system forming in the tropics develops into a Category hurricane, 1 making its way slowly up the east coast of the United States. Normally a storm such as this would be expected to make a right- hand turn and move off across the Atlantic. Conditions, however, are not normal. This storm is about to encounter an intense low- pressure weather system associated with an unusual configuration of the jet stream, linked potentially to an abnormally warm condition in the Arctic. Forecasts suggest that rather than turning right, the storm is going to turn left and intensify as it moves over unseasonably warm water off the New Jersey coast. It develops into what some would describe as the storm of the century. New York and New Jersey feel the brunt of the damage. The impact extends as far north as Maine and as far south as North Carolina. Lower Manhattan is engulfed by a 14- foot storm surge, flooding the subway, plunging the city south of 39th Street into darkness. Residents of Staten Island fear for their lives as their homes are flooded, as they lose power, and as their community is effectively isolated from the rest of the world. As many as 23 people are drowned as floodwaters engulf much of the borough. Beach communities of New Jersey are devastated. As much as a week after the storm has passed, more than a million homes and businesses in New York and New Jersey are still without power. Estimates of damage range as high as $60 billion. This is the story of the devastation brought about by Hurricane Sandy in late October of 2012.The encounter with Sandy prompted a number of queries concerning a possible link to human- induced global climate change. Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, commented: “Part of the learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality.”

The climate system envelops our planet, with swirling fluxes of mass, momentum, and energy through air, water, and land. Its processes are partly regular and partly chaotic. The regularity of diurnal and seasonal fluctuations in these processes is well understood. Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding some of the mechanisms that induce deviations from that regularity in many parts of the globe. These mechanisms include a set of combined oceanic–atmospheric phenomena with quasi-regular manifestations. The largest of these is centered in the Pacific Ocean and is known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The term “oscillation” refers to a shifting pattern of atmospheric pressure gradients that has distinct manifestations in its alternating phases. In the Arctic and North Atlantic regions, the occurrence of somewhat analogous but less regular interactions known as the Arctic Oscillation and its offshoot, the North Atlantic Oscillation, are also being studied. These and other major oscillations influence climate patterns in many parts of the globe. Examples of other large-scale interactive ocean–atmosphere– land processes are the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, the Pacific/North American pattern, the Tropical Atlantic Variability, the West Pacific pattern, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation, and the Indian Ocean Dipole. In this chapter we review the earth’s climate system in general, define climate variability, and describe the processes related to ENSO and the other major systems and their interactions. We then consider the possible connections of the major climate variability systems to anthropogenic global climate change. The climate system consists of a series of fluxes and transformations of energy (radiation, sensible and latent heat, and momentum), as well as transports and changes in the state of matter (air, water, solid matter, and biota) as conveyed and influenced by the atmosphere, the ocean, and the land masses. Acting like a giant engine, this dynamic system is driven by the infusion, transformation, and redistribution of energy.