So, this is a story about how we know what we know.
今天這個故事是關於 我們如何認知我們所知道的事物。
It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff.
這個故事是關於這位女性: 娜塔莉亞·瑞辛斯基。 她是一位古生物學家。 也就是說她的專長 就是挖掘那些古老的死東西。
(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things."
(音頻)娜塔莉亞·瑞辛斯基: 是的,有些人就稱我為「死物博士」
Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra.
拉蒂夫·納賽爾: 而且我覺得她特別有趣, 因為她挖掘那些東西的地方 都是在北極圈內, 偏遠的加拿大苔原地區。
Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole.
2006 年夏季的一天, 她在一個叫法爾斯葉床的 岩層挖掘現場, 距離地磁北極僅僅不到 10 緯度。
(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil.
(音頻)娜:說真的, 這聽起來並沒那麼有趣。 因為一整天你都要 背著你的背包、GPS、 筆記本,一直長途跋涉, 去撿任何看起來可能是化石的東西。
LN: And at some point, she noticed something.
拉:就在某一刻, 她發現了一些東西。
(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface.
(音頻)娜:它近乎鐵鏽色, 大概像我手掌一樣大小。 它就躺在地面上。
LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before -- prehistoric plant parts. But that night, back at camp ...
拉:最初她以為這是 一小塊碎木頭而已。 因為之前人們每次在法爾斯葉床 找到的都是這種東西 ——史前植物的一部份。 但是那一夜,回到帳篷之後,
(Audio) NR: ... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like ... bone.
(音頻)娜:我拿出放大鏡, 我仔細地觀察,然後突然發現, 它看起來好像沒有年輪啊。 這可能是由於保存的問題, 但是它看起來真的像是... 骨頭。
LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny.
拉:所以在接下來的四年裡, 她一次一次地回到那裡, 最終收集到了 30 塊碎片, 都來自同一塊骨頭。 大多數都很小,
(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag.
(音頻)娜:其實不算很多, 一個小密封袋就能裝得下。
LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was challenging.
拉:然後她嘗試像拼拼圖一樣, 把碎片都拼在一起。 這非常具有挑戰性。
(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner.
(音頻)娜:它碎成太多片了, 我們試圖用沙土和塑鋼土來復原, 但是效果並不是很好。 所以最後,我們用了一個 3D 表面掃描儀。
LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right?
拉:噢! 娜:沒錯!很棒吧?
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.
拉:事實證明 用虛擬的方式更簡單啊。
(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together.
(音頻)娜:當它們全部拼在 一起的時候,感覺就像魔法一樣!
LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something?
拉:你怎麼確定你拼得是對的? 怎麼確定是用正確的方式 把它們拼起來的? 會不會有可能 當你換一種方式拼的時候, 然後得到一個,嗯,像是長尾鸚鵡 或什麽其他的東西?
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.
(音頻)娜:(大笑) 呃不會,我們肯定是拼對了。
LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. But it couldn't have been either of those. It was just too big.
拉:她發現她拼出來的, 是一根脛骨,也就是一根腿骨。 更具體一點說,這是一根 偶蹄類哺乳動物的脛骨。 像是牛、羊之類的動物。 但是它不可能是牛或羊的。 它實在是太大了。
(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal.
(音頻)娜:這個東西的尺寸 確實很大,這是個大型動物。
LN: So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea.
拉:所以這可能是什麽動物呢? 她遇到了瓶頸。 她把其中一小片碎片 拿給了科羅拉多州的一些同事看, 他們產生了一個想法。
(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it.
(音頻)娜:我們用一把小鋸子, 在碎片邊緣切了個小切口, 它產生了一種引起我們興趣的氣味。
LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.
拉:它聞起來像是燒焦了的肉。 娜塔莉亞分辨出了這種氣味。 她在噁心的大體解剖實驗室 切割骨頭的時候聞到過: 膠原蛋白。 膠原蛋白是構成我們 骨頭結構的物質。 通常,在很多年後, 它會自然分解。 但是這一次,北極圈就像是一個 天然的冷凍箱將它保存了下來。
Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called "collagen fingerprinting." It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match.
一兩年後,娜塔莉亞 去布里斯托參加一個研討會, 她遇到一個同行,叫麥克·巴克利。 他正在演示一種新技術, 他稱之為「膠原蛋白指紋技術」。 事實上,不同物種的膠原蛋白 在結構上是有著微小差異的。 所以如果你有一塊未知骨頭的 膠原蛋白分析圖, 你可以將它與已知物種的 膠原蛋白進行比對。 也許,誰知道呢, 有可能就配對成功了。
So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx.
然後她就給麥克寄了一塊碎片, 用聯邦快遞。
(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important.
(音頻)娜:對啊,你想追蹤貨件 到了哪啊,這很重要的。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to ... a camel.
拉:然後他處理了樣本, 將它與 37 種已知現代哺乳動物 物種進行比對, 然後他配對成功了。 實驗顯示, 娜塔莉亞在北極圈裡 發現的這塊 350 萬歲的骨頭 屬於... 一匹駱駝。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
(Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing -- if it's true.
(音頻)娜:我想,什麽? 如果這是真的,那就太神奇了!
LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton.
拉:所以她們測試了一大堆碎片, 每一塊都得到了相同的結果。 然而,根據她們發現的 那塊骨頭的尺寸, 這個駱駝比現代駱駝大概大 30%。 所以這個駱駝大概有 9 英尺高, 大概 1 噸重。
(Audience reacts)
(觀眾驚呼)
Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel.
是的。 娜塔莉亞發現了一種巨型北極駱駝。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Now, when you hear the word "camel," what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature -- hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic?
現在,當你聽到 「駱駝」一詞的時候, 腦海裡出現的可能是這種: 東亞或者中亞地區的雙峰駱駝, 但很有可能你腦海裡出現的圖片 其實是這種,單峰駱駝。 典型的沙漠動物—— 常常出現在炎熱的沙漠地帶, 像是中東或者撒哈拉地區, 背上有一個巨大的駝峰。 用來為沙漠中的長途跋涉儲存水分; 有著寬大的腳掌幫助牠們踏過沙丘, 所以這些駱駝中的一頭 到底是如何跑到北極圈呢?
Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American.
其實科學家們早就知道, 甚至在娜塔莉亞的發現之前, 駱駝其實是起源於美國。
(Music: The Star-Spangled Banner)
(音樂:《星條旗之歌》美國國歌)
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more.
牠們從這起源, 在駱駝存在的 4500 萬年間, 大概有 4000 萬年的時間, 你只能在北美發現牠們。 大概 20 種不同的物種, 或許更多。
(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different?
拉:如果讓牠們站一排, 看起來會有區別嗎?
NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes.
(音頻)娜:會啊, 牠們的體積差別很大。 有些的脖子會特別長。 所以牠們實際上 從功能來說更像是長頸鹿。
LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles.
拉:有些有鼻子,像鱷魚一樣。
(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits.
(音頻)娜:那些非常原始的 早期駱駝可能非常小; 幾乎是一隻兔子的大小。
LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels?
拉:什麽?兔子大小的駱駝?
(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize.
(音頻)娜:最早的那些是。 所以那些駱駝你可能都認不出來。
LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel.
拉:天哪! 我好想要隻「兔駱駝」寵物啊!
(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great?
(音頻)娜:我知道, 聽起來很棒不是嗎?
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct.
拉:然後大約 300 萬至 700 萬年前, 駱駝的一個分支 向南遷徙到了南美洲。 在那裡牠們進化成了美洲駝和羊駝。 另外一個分支跨過了白令陸橋, 來到亞洲和非洲。 然後在上一次冰河紀末, 北美駱駝滅絕了。
So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north. Like, this is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. You'd have blizzards. You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. Like, how ... How? How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions?
所以科學家早就知道了這些, 但是這並不能完全解釋娜塔莉亞 是怎麼在那麼北的地方發現駱駝的。 這裡從溫度的角度來說, 簡直就是撒哈拉的反義詞。 平心而論, 350 萬年前, 平均溫度比現在大約 高攝氏 22 度。 所以那裡可以算是一個寒帶森林, 就像如今的育空或西伯利亞一樣。 但是那兒仍有六個月長的冬季。 池塘凍結成冰, 暴風雪肆虐, 以及一天 24 小時的永夜; 那麼...到底是怎麼回事? 這些撒哈拉沙漠的超級巨星 是怎麼在這種極地條件下存活的?
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it's kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? What if that hump -- which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat --
娜塔莉亞和她的同事認為 她們找到了答案。 相當絕妙, 假如駱駝的這些特性 並不如我們所想, 是爲了適應撒哈拉沙漠 那樣的環境而產生, 其實是爲了幫助牠們 度過嚴寒才演化出來的呢? 如果那些寬大的腳掌 不是爲了踏過沙丘, 而是爲了踏過雪原,像雪鞋一樣呢? 如果那些駝峰—— 對我來說,真是天大的新聞! 不是儲存水分,而是儲存脂肪——
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. So it helps heat dissipate easier. It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past.
來幫助駱駝度過食物稀缺的 六個月長的嚴冬呢? 然後,遠在牠們跨越大陸橋之後, 才把這些冬季特性 改進成適應炎熱的沙漠環境的呢? 就比如說,那些駝峰 在炎熱的氣候下可能非常有用, 因為把脂肪都存儲在一個地方, 像,你知道的,脂肪背包一樣, 意味著你身體的隔熱層 不需要覆蓋全身。 這樣,散熱就變得容易了。 這是一個瘋狂的想法, 這些看起來像是證明 駱駝典型的沙漠特性的證據, 實際也是證明牠們過去 生活在北極圈裡的證據。
Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes.
我並不是第一個講述這個故事的人, 其他人早已講過 以此讚歎生物進化的神奇, 或著見微知著, 以此來看未來的氣候變化。 但是我愛這個故事, 有一個完全不同的原因。 對我來說,這是關於我們的故事, 關於我們如何看待這個世界, 以及這種認知如何改變的。
So I was trained as a historian. And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes.
我的職業是歷史學家, 我發現,實際上很多科學家 同時也是歷史學家。 他們讓過去有意義, 他們講述我們的 宇宙、星球、地球生命的歷史。 作為一個歷史學家, 你開始於腦海中的一個想法, 關於故事是如何發展的。
(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. Clearly, it always lived there.
(音頻)娜:我們編故事, 然後以此繼續講下去。 就像沙漠裡的駱駝,是吧? 這是個非常棒的故事! 駱駝非常適應沙漠環境, 很明顯,牠一直住在那裡。
LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere.
拉:但是你隨時會 發現一些細小的線索, 你會發現一些細小的東西, 迫使你重新定義 你自以為知道的一切。 就像這個例子,一個科學家發現了 這一個她以為是木頭的碎片, 由此,科學誕生了一個全新的、 反直覺的理論, 來解釋爲什麽這個可笑、 像極了蘇斯博士筆下的生物, 看起來像這樣。 對於我來說, 它完全顛覆了我對駱駝的認知, 牠從只適合這一特定環境 而存在的生物, 變成了世界旅行家, 只是恰好出現在撒哈拉沙漠。 並且可能到達幾乎任何地方。
(Applause)
(掌聲)
This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? OK, here, I've got one of these for you here.
這是阿祖力。 嗨,阿祖力,你好嗎? 來,我給你帶了一些吃的。
(Laughter)
(掌聲)
So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall.
阿祖力剛剛完成她的特約演出, 從紐約無線電城音樂廳來,
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
That's not even a joke. Anyway --
這不是開玩笑。 不過——
But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine.
真的,阿祖力在這裡 作為一個鮮活的例子, 說明這個世界的故事是 瞬息萬變的。 需要我們主動重新調整, 大膽想像。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
Right, Azuri?
對吧?阿祖力。
And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.
真的,我們與看待世界的全新視角 只有一片碎骨頭的距離罷了。
Thank you very much.
非常感謝!
(Applause)
(掌聲)