万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(1)
29 THE RESTLESS APE 第二十九章 永不安分的类人猿 SOMETIME ABOUT A million and a half years ago, some forgotten genius of the hominid world did an unexpected thing. He (or very possibly she) took one stone and carefully used it to shape an
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(2)
In the 1940s a Harvard paleontologist named Hallum Movius drew something called the Movius line, dividing the side with Acheulean tools from the one without. The line runs in a southeasterly direction across Europe and the Middle East to the vicinity
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(3)
As it turned out, there would be a great deal else to be puzzled about, and one of the most puzzling findings of all would come from Thorne's own part of the world, in the outback of Australia. In 1968, a geologist named Jim Bowler was poking around
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(4)
How they got there and why they came are questions that can't be answered. According to most anthropology texts, there's no evidence that people could even speak 60,000 years ago, much less engage in the sorts of cooperative efforts necessary to buil
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The traditional theory to explain human movementsand the one still accepted by the majority of people in the fieldis that humans dispersed across Eurasia in two waves. The first wave consisted of Homo erectus, who left Africa remarkably quicklyalmost
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(6)
These first modern humans are surprisingly shadowy. We know less about ourselves, curiously enough, than about almost any other line of hominids. It is odd indeed, as Tattersall notes, that the most recent major event in human evolutionthe emergence
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For a long time, it was believed that the Cro-Magnons, as modern humans in Europe became known, drove the Neandertals before them as they advanced across the continent, eventually forcing them to its western margins, where essentially they had no cho
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Quite who they were and what they were like remain matters of disagreement and uncertainty. Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neandertal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling, and simianthe
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Above all the issue that is almost never addressed is that Neandertals had brains that were significantly larger than those of modern people 尤其重要的是，有个问题几乎从来没有人解决过，那就是尼安德特人的脑比现代人明
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Opponents of the multiregional theory reject it, in the first instance, on the grounds that it requires an improbable amount of parallel evolution by hominids throughout the Old World in Africa, China, Europe, the most distant islands of Indonesia, w
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Thorne emphatically (and I believe sincerely) dismisses the idea that his theory is in any measure racist and accounts for the uniformity of human evolution by suggesting that there was a lot of movement back and forth between cultures and regions. T
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One thing that would help to resolve matters would be evidence of interbreeding, but that is not at all easy to prove, or disprove, from fossils. In 1999, archeologists in Portugal found the skeleton of a child about four years old that died 24,500 y
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With the fossil record so unhelpful, scientists have turned increasingly to genetic studies, in particular the part known as mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA was only discovered in 1964, but by the 1980s some ingenious souls at the University of
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(14)
By 1992, the study was largely discredited. But the techniques of genetic analysis continued to be refined, and in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyze some DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man,
万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(15)
As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variabilitythere's more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population, as one authority has put itand this would expla
