国家地理 古代侏儒的骸骨（在线收听）

Lee Berger has spent his professional life searching for evidence of mankind's past.

李·伯杰整个职业生涯寻找人类过去的痕迹。

He is a paleo-anthropologist who with some help from National Geographic has been studying and searching for the fossil remains of our ancestors for nearly 20 years.

他是一位古人类学家，在《国家地理》杂志的帮助下，他研究寻找我们祖先的化石遗迹已经将近20年了。

He has done most of his work in Africa, but it was during a vacation stop in Palau, and a walk through one of the many caves in this area that he literally stumbled upon what could be a history-making find.

他的大部分工作都是在非洲完成的，但那是在帕劳度假期间，他在这个地区的洞穴中漫步，偶然有了一个可能创造历史的发现。

"You see that, this is just packed full of buff, I mean you can actually see there are still some naturally exposed here. But what was cool here is we had a whole skull here."“你看，这里面全是软皮，你可以看到这里还有一些自然暴露的东西。但我们发现了一个完整的头骨，酷极了。”

Berger thinks these bones may be the remains of some of the earliest humans ever to populate these islands. Previous estimates date the earliest human habitation to about 29 hundred years ago, but all these bones existed above something called a flowstone. A flowstone is a common occurrence in caves where mineral-rich water flowing over the ground hardens in the stone. All of Berger's previous digging was another flowstone that dated back about 29 hundred years. Today he's returned and is going to break through the flowstone to see if there are bones underneath. "We are hoping that flowstone and consolidated sandstone took at least a few hundred years to form maybe longer than that. Hope is that these dates are gonna come out over the three-thousand-year mark."

伯杰认为这些骨头可能是最早居住在这些岛屿上的人类的遗骸。之前的估计是人类最早的居住地出现在2900年前，但是这些骨头都存在于一种叫做流石的东西上面。富含矿物质的水流过地面，在石头中硬化。在这样的洞穴中，流石很常见。伯杰之前一直在挖掘另一块大约有2900年历史的流石。今天他回来了，打算穿过流石看看下面是否有骨头。“我们希望流石和固结砂岩至少需要几百年的时间才能形成，也许比这还要长。希望能超过三千年。”

He finds no shortage of bone underneath the flowstone including a tooth and a piece of cranium. But what these bones begin to tell Berger has far-reaching implications beyond the dating. The bones that Berger has found has some very unusual characteristics, a reduced chin, large teeth and what might be a small brain-size, leading Berger to reconsider his notion of what humans can look like.

他发现流石下面有很多骨头，包括一颗牙齿和一块头盖骨。但这些骨骼包含的信息，除了年代以外，还有深远的含义。伯杰所发现的骨骼有一些非常不寻常的特征，如下巴小、牙齿大，大脑可能更小，这使得伯杰重新考虑他对人类长相的看法。

"That's nice. We have found this small island population with all of these characters and that appears to be human that is pushing the published boundaries of human variation."

“那很好。我们发现这个岛上的人有这么多的特征，这里的人类似乎在推翻人类变异的边界。”

It might also have some implications for another set of bones found in the region, those of the tiny human that researchers dubbed "the hobbit". Its scientific name is Homo Floresiensis. And the researchers including Dean Falk from the University of Florida say it is so unique, it should be a separate species of human. The controversy of the hobbit is ongoing, but Berger's finding let him to believe that Flores might not be a separate species.

这可能还会对该地区发现的另一组骨骼产生一些影响，这些微小人类的骨骼，研究人员认为它们属于“霍比特人”。它的学名是弗洛里斯人。佛罗里达大学的迪安·福尔克等研究人员说，它非常独特，应该是一个单独的人类物种。霍比特人的争议还在继续，但伯格尔的发现让他相信弗洛雷斯可能不是一个单独的物种。

"...and also making me personally consider my understanding of what is normal even variation.“…同时也让我思考我对正常甚至变异的理解。

Berger's published a paper suggesting the bones are amazing because they show the incredible range of humans, in regards to size and shape. This new understanding of the potential of human variation might make us reconsider just how different the hobbits really are. The controversies will continue, but in the meantime, Berger will return.

伯杰发表的一篇论文表明，这些骨头令人惊叹，因为它们向我们展示了人类的大小和形状能有多么令人难以置信。这种对人类变异可能的新理解可能会让我们重新思考霍比特人到底有多不同。争论还会继续，但与此同时，伯杰会回来。

"What has struck me on this second scientific visit is how phenomenally little research has been done on these islands."

“在第二次科学访问中，让我印象深刻的是，关于这些岛屿，几乎没有进行任何研究。”

But Berger hopes to personally change that in the coming years, as he makes his way back to Palau, to continue his search for answers to our past.

但伯杰希望在接下来的几年里，当他再来帕劳的时候，能亲自改变这种状况，继续寻找我们过去的答案。