第二章

　　Our earliest ancestors

　　我们最早的祖先

　　We know very little about the first "true" men. We have never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy.

　　我们关于原始的"真"人知道的很少。我们从不曾见过他们的图像。有时我们在最深的地层里，寻出几片他们的枯骨来。这些枯骨大概都混杂在早已绝种的动物的碎骨中。人类学者（那些有学问的科学家把人当作动物界中的分子，去作终身的研究）居然将它们极精细的构成我们最早的祖宗。

　　The growth of the human skull

　　（人的头颅之生长）

　　The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had coloured his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too, were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey. His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava.

　　人类最早的祖宗是一种寒伧，不讨人喜欢的哺乳动物。他的体格很小，比较现在的人小得多。他的皮肤因为风吹日曝，染成棕褐色。他的头部，身体的大部分，以及两腿两臂都长满了粗长的毛发。他有细而有力的手指，使他的手颇像猴子的。他的前额是低的，他的颚像那些用牙齿代刀叉的野兽的颚。他不穿衣服。除去火山的火焰，他没有见过火。

　　He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his own young.

　　他同现在非洲的矮人一样，住在潮湿黑暗的森林里。他饿了，就以树叶和树根来充饥，或从一只发怒的鸟身旁抢蛋来喂他自己的小孩。