Supai - The Most Remote Human Settlement of The United States of America

For at least 800 years now, the Havasupai tribal people have been living around the region of Havasu Waterfall in the Cataract Canyon region of the Great Grand Canyon of North America. World has seen tons of development over this span & has changed almost upside down - the world began connecting like never before & United States of America became the most developed nation of the planet but this small village and its distinct tribe hasn’t seen many of the such changes experienced by the rest of the Human community. Supai is around 13 kilometres away from the nearest vehicular road. The mail service is still carried out by mules which makes it one of a very few such spaces in the United States where connectivity is almost ancient. It has been referred to as the most remote community in the contiguous United States of America by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Havasu Fall

Images from maverickairlines, dailymail, amusingplanet, wherervgoing, ggpht, simplysupai, si-cdn, onlyinyourstate, huffingtonpost & arizona-leisure

New York - The Grand Old Modern City

A human settlement got settled following Henry Hudson’s exploration in 1609 as a colony of the Netherlands, a fort named as ‘Orange’ was established in 1624 by the Dutch at modern Albany as the first permanent settlement, the following year New Amsterdam got its birth after Peter Miniut, the then Dutch Governor legalised the settlement by paying 60 Dutch guilders to the Indians. The Dutch West India Company started issuing land patents to the residents i.e. a person can now hold title of the land, which was something not possible in Europe at that particular time attracting migrations towards an untouched land for writing their life history. When an English fleet sailed into New Amsterdam in 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, the Governor surrendered without a fight and the settlement got its new name under the legacy of the Duke of York as ‘New York’. The population of the city in 1698 was about 18,000 which grew upto around 1,63,000 by the eve of the American Revolution. 

The city of New York consisted of many neighbourhoods distributed amongst the city’s five boroughs - Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and the Staten Island each of whom had a different lifestyle one of whose main reasons was the issuance of land permits started by the Dutch and followed by the Britishers as part of their policy which resulted into a human society with one of the most cosmopolitan culture of all times. After being only the third largest port of America at the time of the American Revolution, New York experienced a major rise and soon by mid 1800’s it began handling more than half of the country’s international trade while ocean being the medium. It became the world’s busiest port in the twentieth century which it held by for decades after. 

Simultaneously, the haphazard pattern of streets raised the need for a commissioner of streets in 1798 which earmarked the beginning of urban planning as an official exercise. The site’s geographical age dates to about 100 million years back as found through the sections of the granite bedrock which allowed and suited for designing modern skyscrapers with firm base. The administrative structure of New York was shaped by the consolidation of the city and its neighbourhood in 1898. During the same time, the population of the city got doubled from being around 1,500,000 in 1890 to 3,000,000 in 1900 and city started facing huge gaps in human transit system. The first segment of the subway system was opened in 1904 which started handling more than two billion passengers per year by 1940’s. The subway system helped in changing the urban structure of the city and its progress. It also gave rise to the modern culture of work system over many parts around the Globe with human beings travelling from one corner of urban sprawl to another daily in many senses which are often more than an hour of a single way trip.

With the rising human mobility and energy consumption, air and water pollution began declining the air and water quality especially after 1960’s the city started facing congestion both of the highways and the public mass transit system. Housing shortage started boosting up. Like every other city faces some kind of crisis at some point of their life, New York too had faced some financial crisis one of such scenario took place in 1975 when the city’s authority lacked enough money to pay all its bills for the year and it was taken care by the interference of the state authority and Municipal Assistance Corporation came into existence which ended some money to help city in paying its debt. The population of the city increased from being 7,000,000 around in 1930 to about 8,500,000 in 2014. It can be said that the city’s population saw stagnation (majorly due to the city now being in the mature stage) but most of the bigger cities of the United States have lesser population now than they had around 50 years ago.

Poverty has been one of the major issues for the city traditionally of whose levels have seen many ups and downs historically. The poverty rate rose to 21.2 percent in 2012 from being 20.9 the previous year which is a healthy population of around 1.7 million human beings. The city budgets more than $4 billion a year on welfare programs to provide food, clothing, housing, medical care, and other benefits. The city has been one of the largest employment producer for the entire country but the authority has struggled to get rid of this menace. The other issue is that of carbon emissions for which the city’s authority can be seen thinking positively in the direction and a roadmap was prepared in 2014 to cut the emissions by 80 % than it was in 2005. An initiative under the title ‘PlaNYC’ was initialised in 2007  which started from dealing emissions by 30 per cent by 2025. The city is primarily focusing on the efficiency of the buildings which contributes more than 60 per cent for the aggregate carbon produced by the city. New York City gives a good picture by accounting only 1 per cent of United States greenhouse gas emissions while housing 2.7 per cent of its population. Water consumption per capita has also decreased from being 208 gallons per day per capita to around 125 gallons per day per capita in 2009 which are good signs of rising awareness and preserving water for worse. The city due to its strategic geographic position also faces the risk for frequent heavy storms. The city has also been warned for the economic and human cost of land submergence as has been the case of the other coastal cities around the planet. The city shall think more towards long lasting measures to make itself more disaster friendly and alternative solutions are also needed to be taken. The city was also ranked amongst one of the dirtiest cities of the United States and in the world's first metropolitan  modern city, it seems issues and problems have never left the hand of the city besides some significant changes over the last couple of decades. 

In a city where modern urban life got its existence much before than in nearly any other modern city, New York has seen nearly all kinds of times like a grand old man generally considered as to have seen all aspects of human life. The example of the creation and visualisation strength of the human beings provides an exemplary scenario for the cities which are in their young age and are needed to be examined from multiple angles based on the context of theirs. The role of the authority is also one key thing which New York as a city provides in the catalogue which have tried to engage the society for making it efficient and sustainable especially after 1980’s. The city has experimented and seem to be finding its age-like behaviour i.e. more responsible now by looking the urban frame from multiple windows which other cities should quickly grasp and apply efficient, sustainable and long-lasting measures for the rising issues across the megacities of the world. The city has to keep up the pace with other fast developing cities in the matter of competitiveness and in order to increase the longevity of the city - for it one step should be towards engaging and inspiring the community in order to hold on and revive its presence in the very dynamic process of urbanisation especially in this highly increasing virtually globalised world.

Image from dormroomfund 

How Human Beings Colonized the Five Continents?

In 1871, Charles Darwin in his book ‘The Descent of Man’ suggested that humans have evolved from the same African ape ancestors that gave rise to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. Although little fossil evidence existed at that time to support Darwin’s case, numerous fossil discoveries made since then strongly support his hypothesis. The first humans or how the human race evolved is a matter of some interesting phases.

The earliest primate with two distinct qualities – grasping the fingers and binocular vision, evolved around 65 million years ago giving rise first to prosimians and then to monkeys. Other mammals do have binocular vision but the combination of the above two provided the ground for an ease in adaptation with the environment.

The earliest primates split into two further categories around 40 million year – prosimians (before monkeys) and anthropoids. The prosimians were nocturnal generally feeding on fruits and plants. The anthropoids, or higher primates, include monkeys, apes, and humans. Anthropoids are almost all diurnal—that is, active during the day—feeding mainly on fruits and leaves. Evolution favoured many changes in eye design, including colour vision, that were adaptations to daytime foraging. An expanded brain governs the improved senses, with the braincase forming a larger portion of the head. Anthropoids, like the relatively few diurnal prosimians, live in groups with complex social interactions.

Prosimian - Grasping Fingers and Binocular Vision

About 30 million years ago, some anthropoids migrated to South America, where they evolved in isolation. Around 25 million years ago, anthropoids that remained in Africa split into two lineages: one gave rise to the Old World monkeys and one gave rise to the Hominids. Hominids include the apes and the hominids (humans and their direct ancestors). Apes exhibit the most adaptable behaviour of any mammal except human beings. Once widespread in Africa and Asia, apes are rare today, living in relatively small areas. No apes ever occurred in North or South America.

Apes, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, arose from an ancestor common to Old World monkeys. The first hominids were australopithecines, of which there were several different kinds. The ability to walk upright on two legs marks the beginning of hominid evolution. One can draw the hominid family tree in two very different ways, either lumping variants together or splitting them into separate species. There may have been several species of early Homo, with brains significantly larger than those of australopithecines. The first hominid species to leave Africa was the relatively large-brained Homo erectus, the longest lived species of Homo. Modern humans evolved within the last 600,000 years, our own species within the last 200,000 years. Our species is unique in evolving culturally. Language and cultural adaptations have made the level of advancements to the extent we living in. Differences in populations in skin colour reflect adaptation to different environments, rather than genetic differentiation among populations.

How Human Beings Spread Across the World?

1. African Cradle

Most paleoanthropologists and geneticists agree that modern humans arose some 200,000 years ago in Africa. The earliest modern human fossils were found in Omo Kibish, Ethiopia. Sites in Israel hold the earliest evidence of modern humans outside Africa, but that group went no farther, dying out about 90,000 years ago.

2. Out of Africa

Genetic data show that a small group of modern humans left Africa for good 70,000 to 50,000 years ago and eventually replaced all earlier types of humans, such as Neanderthals. All non-Africans are the descendants of these travellers, who may have migrated around the top of the Red Sea or across its narrow southern opening.

3. The First Australians

Discoveries at two ancient sitesÑ artifacts from Malakunanja and fossils from Lake MungoÑ indicated that modern humans followed a coastal route along southern Asia and reached Australia nearly 50,000 years ago. Their descendants, Australian Aborigines, remained genetically isolated on that island continent until recently.

4. Early Europeans

 Paleoanthropologists long thought that the peopling of Europe followed a route from North Africa through the Levant. But genetic data show that the DNA of today's western Eurasians resembles that of people in India. It's possible that an inland migration from Asia seeded Europe between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago.

5. Populating Asia

Around 40,000 years ago, humans pushed into Central Asia and arrived on the grassy steppes north of the Himalaya. At the same time, they travelled through Southeast Asia and China, eventually reaching Japan and Siberia. Genetic clues indicate that humans in northern Asia eventually migrated to the Americas.

6. In to the New World

Exactly when the first people arrived in the Americas is still hotly debated. Genetic evidence suggests it was between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, when sea levels were low and land connected Siberia to Alaska. Ice sheets would have covered the interior of North America, forcing the new arrivals to travel down the west coast.

Images from portalciencia, pixdaus, luna and planet uwc

Reference : How Humans Evolved? and The Greatest Journey