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002 : Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool 奥杜瓦伊石质切割工具
Abstract摘要 :
Olduvai stone chopping tool (made 1.8 million years ago) found in Olduvai Gorge1, Tanzania, East Africa.
奥杜瓦伊(Olduvai)石质切割工具(180万年前)，出土于东非坦桑尼亚奥杜瓦伊(Olduvai)峡谷
MP3听力原文：
Perhaps the best thing of all about being Director of the British Museum, and one that still gives me the most enormous thrill is that, now and then, I'm allowed to take some of the objects out of the cases and hold them.
作为大英博物馆馆长，大概最美好一件事便是我偶尔可以拿出展柜中的某些物品握在手中。我至今仍为之心潮澎湃。
And today I'm being allowed to hold something absolutely astonishing. I've got to admit that if any of us saw this just lying on the ground, we'd probably walk past it, but in fact it's the oldest object in the British Museum, and it was made nearly two million years ago, in Africa. It looks like a large, chipped grey cobble.
今天，我就被批准拿出一样极其惊世骇俗的物品。我得承认，如果我们只是看到它毫不起眼地摆在地上，很可能就一带而过了，但事实让，它可是大英博物馆最古老的展品。它来自于200万年前的非洲大陆，看上去就像一块人为切割过的灰色大卵石。我和博物学家兼广播员大卫?阿滕伯勒爵士(Sir David Attenborough)是最近一次触摸过它的人科动物。
"Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African savannahs, needing to cut flesh for example, needing to cut into a carcass, in order to get a meal."
“握着它，我便能感受到非洲大草原上的野外生活——为了一顿饭，要剔骨剜肉。”
This is one of the first things that humans ever consciously made. And holding it puts me directly in touch with them. In this history of the world that I'm trying to tell through 'things', this chipped stone from Africa - from modern Tanzania - is where it all begins.
这是人类自觉制作的首批工具之一，一拿起它，我就能感受到与祖先一脉相承的联系。在这个以人造物为线索的世界简史系列节目中，这件来自当今坦桑尼亚地区的非洲打制石器乃人类世界万物之端。
I've come out of the front steps by the main door of the British Museum. One of the points of any museum is to allow you to travel through time, but our understanding of just how much time there is for us to travel through has expanded dramatically since the British Museum opened its doors in 1759. At that point, most of the visitors would probably have agreed that the world had begun in 4004 BC, to be precise at the very beginning of Sunday 23 October.
所有博物馆的目标之一就是引领你穿越时间，然而，自1759年大英博物馆开启重门以来，我们时光之旅的界限便与日俱增。过去，也许大多参观者的共识是世界开始于公元前4400年，更精确地说，是10月23日星期天的零点。
This astonishingly exact date had been calculated by the mathematically-minded clergyman Archbishop Ussher, who preached just down the road in Lincoln's Inn. Ussher had carefully trawled the Bible totting up the lifespan of everyone descended2 from Adam and Eve to reach his date but, as you and I know, we don't now celebrate 23 October as Start the World Day and that's because, in the last couple of centuries, archaeologists, geologists3 and museum curators have steadily4 been pushing back the chronology of human history - back from Archbishop Ussher's six thousand years to an almost unimaginable two million.
这一精确得不可思议的时间是由一位颇具数学头脑的神职人员厄舍(Ussher)计算出来的，他布道的地点就在本街的林肯律师学院。他一丝不苟地查阅了《圣经》，统计亚当夏娃所有后裔的寿命才得出这一结果，但就我们所知，没有人庆祝10月23号的“世界开始日”，因为几个世纪以来，考古学家、地质学家以及博物馆馆长一直在把人类历史纪年不断推延——从厄舍大主教的6000年到难以置信的200万年。
So if the scientists have been suggesting that Adam and Eve no longer stood at the beginning of human time in the Garden of Eden in 4004 BC, who did? And where? There are many theories, but no conclusive5 answers and certainly no conclusive date until 1931, when a young archaeologist called Louis Leakey set off on a British Museum-sponsored expedition bound for Africa.
既然科学家推测公元前4400年伊甸园中的亚当夏娃已非人类的先驱，那么彼何人斯，彼何处斯？曾有过许多理论，但直至1931年，有一位名为路易斯?李基(Louis Leaky)的青年考古学家在大英博物馆的资助下远征非洲，他的考古发现为这个问题做出了明确的解答。
收听单词发音 |
1
gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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2
descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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3
geologists
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| 地质学家，地质学者( geologist的名词复数 ) | |
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4
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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5
conclusive
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| adj.最后的，结论的；确凿的，消除怀疑的 | |
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