每日一翻：Looking Back On 40 Years of Lucy

Forty years ago yesterday, November 24, 1974, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson found in Ethiopia what’s arguably the most famous and important fossil of a human ancestor: Lucy. Last month, at the ScienceWriters2014 meeting in Columbus, Ohio, Johanson talked about the moment he laid eyes on Lucy.

40年前的昨天，也就是1974年的11月24日，古人类学家唐纳德·约翰逊在埃塞俄比亚发现可论证的最出名最重要的人类祖先Lucy的化石。上个月，在俄亥俄州哥伦布市的科学作家2014会议上，约翰逊讲述了他看到Lucy那一刹那的感受。

“On that eventful day in 1974 I was out, with a graduate student, Tom Gray, and we were walking back to our Land Rover to go back to camp to enjoy a swim in the river with the crocodiles and enjoy a nice little lunch. And I am always looking at the ground. I find more quarters by parking meters than anybody I know, I think. And you know how it is you find what you’re looking for, right?

“在1974年那具有重大意义的一天，我和一位名叫汤姆·格雷的研究生出去，我们正在走回我们的路虎车然后准备返回营地去到河里和鳄鱼一起游泳，然后享受一顿美味的午餐。我总是看着地上。我想，我用停车计时器找到的营房比我知道的任何人找到的都多。你知道怎么找到你要找的东西，对吧？

“Because a year before the discovery a geologist had left his footprints four-to-five feet away from the skeleton, because he was looking for rocks. I was looking for bones. And I found a little piece of elbow, that little hinge that allows us to flex and extend our arm. And I knew from my studies of osteology, of comparative anatomy and so on, that this had to be from a human ancestor.

“And I as looked up the slope, I saw other fragments eroding out. And we recovered over a two-week-long excavation operation roughly, not counting hand and foot bones, 40 percent of a skeleton. And this was important because first of all it broke the three-million-year time barrier. All the fossils older than three million years at that point in the history of paleoanthropology would fit in the palm of your hand…we didn’t know it was a new species really until a few years later when we finally published in 1978 the name　Australopithecus afarensis.”

“我抬头一看，看到其他的碎片被侵蚀出来。我们通过一个长达两星期的粗糙的挖掘操作恢复了40%的骨架，不包括手和脚的骨头。首先，这是非常重要的，因为它打破了三百万年的时间障碍。所有比古人类历史中三百万年这一点年老的化石将适合你的手掌…直到几年后我们最终在1978年出版南方古猿阿法种之前，我们真的不知道这是一个新物种。”

For more, check out the blog item on our website by Scientific American’s Kate Wong, who, with Johanson, co-authored the book Lucy’s Legacy. Kate’s blog is titled The Fossil That Revolutionized the Search for Human Origins: A Q&A with Lucy Discoverer Donald Johanson.

想了解更多，请浏览我们网站上由《科学美国人》Kate Wong负责的栏目，他和约翰逊合著了《露西的遗产》一书。Kate的博客标题是《寻找人类起源的革命性化石：露西发现者唐纳德·约翰逊的问答》。

—Steve Mirsky