新概念英语4册第1课

Finding Fossil Man

We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas -- legends handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from. Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone dows not decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.

我们可以了解五千年前在近东发生的一些事情，那里是人们首先学会书写的地方。但是在世界的某些角落至今仍有一些人不能够书写。他们记录自己历史的唯一方式是把它们描述成传奇故事--从一代的小说家传递到另一代的传说。这些传说是相当有用的，因为它们告诉我们一些很久前居住的人的迁移的事情，但是没有人可以写下来他们做了什么。人类学家很好奇现今居住在太平洋岛上的玻利尼西亚人是从哪里来的。关于这些人的传奇解释说他们中的一些人大约两千年前来自印尼。但是第一批象我们一样的人已经在那里居住了太长时间以至于甚至忘记了自己的传奇故事，如果他们有的话。所以考古学家既没有历史也没有传奇故事帮助他们找出第一批“现代人”来自何方。然而，幸运的是，古代人用石头制造工具，因为他们比其他东西容易成型，（这些工具）相当坚硬。他们也会使用木头和兽皮，但这些都已经腐烂了。石头不会腐烂，所以这些很久前的工具已经存在了相当长的时间，甚至制造这些工具的人尸骨都已经消失的毫无痕迹。