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Lesson 1 Finding Fossil man
We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near
East, where
people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world
where even
now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their
history is to
recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of
story-tellers
to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us
something about
migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down
what they
did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the
Polynesian
peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of
these people
explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that
even their
sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have
neither history nor
legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came
from.
Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially
flint, because
this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used
wood
and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so
the tools of
long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them
have
disappeared without trace.
New words and expressions 生詞和短語
fossil man (title)
adj. 化石人
recount
v. 敘述
saga
n. 英雄故事
legend
n. 傳說，傳奇
migration
n. 遷移，移居
anthropologist
n. 人類學(xué)家
archaeologist
n. 考古學(xué)家
ancestor
n. 祖先
Polynesian
adj.波利尼西亞（中太平洋之一群島）的
Indonesia
n. 印度尼西亞
flint
n. 燧石
rot
n. 爛掉
參考譯文
我們從書籍中可讀到5,000
年前近東發(fā)生的事情，那里的人最早學(xué)會了寫字。但直到現(xiàn)在,世界上有些地方，人們還不會書寫。
他們保存歷史的唯一辦法是將歷史當(dāng)作傳說講述，由講述人一代接一代地將史實(shí)描述為傳奇故事口傳下來。人類學(xué)家過去不清楚如今生活在太平洋諸島上的波利尼西亞人的祖先來自何方，當(dāng)?shù)厝说膫髡f卻告訴人們：其中一部分是約在2,000年前從印度尼西亞遷來的。
但是，和我們相似的原始人生活的年代太久遠(yuǎn)了，因此，有關(guān)他們的傳說既使有如今也失傳了。于是，考古學(xué)家們既缺乏歷史記載，又無口頭傳說來幫助他們弄清最早的“現(xiàn)代人”是從哪里來的。
然而，
幸運(yùn)的是，遠(yuǎn)古人用石頭制作了工具，特別是用燧石，因?yàn)殪菔^之其他石頭更容易成形。他們也可能用過木頭和獸皮，但這類東西早已腐爛殆盡。石頭是不會腐爛的。因此，盡管制造這些工具的人的骨頭早已蕩然無存，但遠(yuǎn)古時代的石頭工具卻保存了下來。
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