纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 003奥杜威手斧（3）（在线收听）

'Now, if I really wanted to refine that - and people did want to refine that, they really were creative people; they wanted to make beautiful objects, not just functional objects - what I could then do is change the hammer from a big stone hammer to a hammer that is much softer ... a piece of antler is a perfect hammer. And what we would do then, is actually thin the piece down and refine the shape, work our way round ... and in about 10 to 15 minutes, there's your handaxe.'

“现在，假设我真想进行精加工——其实早期人类还真想要精加工，他们可堪称是创意人，想要制造的有美感的物品，不仅仅只是功能性的物品。总之呢，我现在得做的是，收起这把大石锤，换一更加小巧、硬度低点的锤子，挑块鹿角当锤子就很合适了。接下来我们就把这里细细削薄，沿着边缘一圈削下来……这样加工上大概十到十五分钟，你的手斧就出来了。”菲尔·哈丁解释道。

But as well as great manual dexterity, what's important for our story is the conceptual leap required - to be able to imagine in the rough lump of stone the shape that you want to make, in the way a sculptor today can see the statue inside the block of marble.

然而且不谈这工艺如何之精湛，我们故事中的重点是其中所需的概念性飞跃，即能够从粗糙的石头疙瘩里面想像出你所想要制造的工具形状，正如当代的雕塑家可以从大理石块中构思出成型的雕像一样。

This particular piece of supreme hi-tech stone is between 1.2 and 1.4 million years old. Like the chopping tool we were looking at in the last programme, it was found in East Africa, at Olduvai Gorge, that great split in the savannah in Tanzania.

这件特别的精巧高技术石器大约有120至140万岁了。正如我们上集节目中介绍的那件石制砍砸器，这石斧也出土于东非的奥杜威峡谷那道坦桑尼亚大草原上的大裂缝。

But this comes from a higher geological layer than the chopping tool, and there's a huge leap between those earliest first stone tools and this handaxe, because I think it's in this tool that we find the real beginnings of modern humans. The person that made this is, I think, a person we would have recognised as someone like us.

但这石斧出土的地质层比那砍砸器更晚一些，而且两者之间存在着最大的质的飞跃，因为我觉得这石斧才正是现代人类的真正开端。我想我们会认同制造这件物品的那个人与我们是同样的人类。

All this carefully focussed and planned creativity implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world and how their brains worked. But this handaxe may contain the evidence of something even more remarkable. Does this chipped stone tool hold the secret of speech? Was it in making things like this that we learned how to talk to one another?

诸如此类的井井有条、构思完善的创造力，意思味着我们祖先在看待世界与其自身的大脑运上都有了长足的进步。然而这块石斧可能也蕴藏着其他更加不可寻常的证据。这块打制石器是否隐藏着语言的秘密？我们是否在制作类似这样工具时学会了彼此用语言交流？

Recently, scientists have looked at what happens inside the brain when a stone tool is being made. They've used modern hospital scanners to see which bits of the brain are used when a knapper is working with stone - and surprisingly the areas of the modern brain activated when you're making a handaxe overlap considerably with those you use when you speak. It now seems very likely that if you can shape a stone you can shape a sentence.

近来科学家研究了制造工具的过程人类大脑中的活动情况。他们采用现代医学扫瞄仪来观察当石匠加工石器时，大脑的哪部分会被使用到。令人惊讶的是，当时进石器制作时现代人大脑活动区域与使用语言时大脑活动区域有相当大的一部分是重叠的。现在看来极有可能当你有能力加工一块石头，你就有能力加工一个句子。