Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool 奥杜瓦伊石质切割工具(大英博物馆-BBC纪录片)

BBC纪录片整理了大英博物馆的100件文物,这是第二件的讲词

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 Gorge, 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. The naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough is, along with me, the latest hominid to handle it:

BBC纪录片整理了大英博物馆的100件文物,这是第二件的讲词

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。

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.

BBC纪录片整理了大英博物馆的100件文物,这是第二件的讲词

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 descended 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, geologists and museum curators have steadily 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 conclusive answers and certainly no

BBC纪录片整理了大英博物馆的100件文物,这是第二件的讲词

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。 Leakey's goal was Olduvai Gorge, a deep crack in the flat savannah of northern Tanzania, not far from the border with Kenya. It's part of the East African Rift Valley, a massive tear in the earth's surface, thousands of miles long. It was here that time had been frozen within exposed layers of geology where, as Leakey examined the rocks shaped by the sun, the wind and the rain on the savannahs, he reached a layer where the rocks were also shaped by something else - human hands.

李基(Leakey)的目的地是北坦桑尼亚与肯尼亚交界附近的奥杜瓦伊(Olduvai)峡谷——平坦大草原上一道幽深的裂痕。它所隶属的东非大裂谷是地球表面长达几千英里的巨大缝隙，在这里，时光凝结在那些饱经大草原风吹日晒雨淋的裸露的地质层中。考古过程中，李基(Leakey)检测到其中一个岩层由某种非自然力塑造而成——那是人类的双手。

They were found next to bones, and it was clear that these stones had been shaped into butchering tools to strip meat and break into the bones of animals killed on the savannah. The layer where the tools were found was roughly two million years old. This was archaeological dynamite

BBC纪录片整理了大英博物馆的100件文物,这是第二件的讲词

这些石器发现于散落的骨骼周围，显然是用于剔骨剜肉的屠宰工具。该地质层粗略估计约200万年历史。这一发现在当时的考古学界可谓爆炸性的新闻。

Leakey's excavations produced the oldest humanly made things anywhere in the world, and they demonstrated that not only human beings, but human culture, had begun in Africa. Our stone chopping tool was one of the ones that Leakey found.

李基(Leakey)发掘出的是全世界最古老的人造物，它们表明，不仅是人类，甚至于人类文明，皆发端于非洲。我们要介绍的打制石器就是李基(Leakey)挖掘的文物之一。

"Picking it up, your first reaction is it's very heavy, and if it's heavy of course it gives power behind your blow. The second is that it fits without any compromise into the palm of the hand, and in a position where there is a sharp edge running from my forefinger to my wrist.

“你拿起它，第一反应就是它沉甸甸的，这样它的重力为击打提供冲力。其次它恰到好处地符合你的手掌，锋利的刀刃正好位于食指和手腕之间。那现在我手里握着一把锋利的刀。 So I have in my hand now a sharp knife. And what is more, it's got a bulge on it so I can get a firm grip on the edge which has been chipped specially, which is sharp ... I could perfectly effectively cut meat with this. That's the sensation I have that links me with the man who actually laboriously chipped it once, twice, three times, four times, five times on one side. One, two, three ... three times at the other ... so eight specific actions by him, knocking it with another stone,