万物简史 第636期:神秘的两足动物(14)（在线收听）

A human body has 206 bones, but many of these are repeated. If you have the left femur from a specimen, you don't need the right to know its dimensions. Strip out all the redundant bones, and the total you are left with is 120—what is called a half skeleton. Even by this fairly accommodating standard, and even counting the slightest fragment as a full bone, Lucy constituted only 28 percent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 percent of a full one).

一个人有206块骨头，但其中不少是重复的。如果你有一块左股骨标本，你不去找右股骨也能知道它的大小。除去所有这些重复的部分，你所剩余的骨头总数为120块—一即所谓的半骨骼。可是，即便以这样的方式来计算，即便是把最小的碎片也算做是一块完整的骨头，露西被发现的骨头也只占半骨骼的28%（只占一副完整的骨骼的约20%）。

In The Wisdom of the Bones, Alan Walker recounts how he once asked Johanson how he had come up with a figure of 40 percent. Johanson breezily replied that he had discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet—more than half the body's total, and a fairly important half, too, one would have thought, since Lucy's principal defining attribute was the use of those hands and feet to deal with a changing world. At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female. Her sex is merely presumed from her diminutive size.

在《骨头的学问》一书中，艾伦·沃克记述道，有一次他问约翰森，他是怎样得出40%的结论。约翰森微笑着回答说，他没有将手和脚的106块骨头计算在内——你或许会认为，手和脚的骨头约占人类骨骼总数的一半还多，而且还是十分重要的一半，因为露西之所以是露西，毕竟是因为她是借助手和脚来迎对一个不断变化的世界的。无论如何，对于露西，我们的猜测远远多于了解。事实上，连她是不是一位女性我们也不知道，她的性别也仅仅是根据她身材较小而推论出来的。

Two years after Lucy's discovery, at Laetoli in Tanzania Mary Leakey found footprints left by two individuals from—it is thought—the same family of hominids. The prints had been made when two australopithecines had walked through muddy ash following a volcanic eruption. The ash had later hardened, preserving the impressions of their feet for a distance of over twenty-three meters.

在发现露西后两年，在坦桑尼亚的莱托里，玛丽·利基发现了被认为是来自同一家族的两个人科动物的一串脚印。这些脚印是两个南方古猿在一次火山喷发后在泥泞的火山灰中行走时留下的。火山灰后来变硬，保存了他们行走23米多远的脚印。