Jambo, bonjour, zdravstvujtye, dayo: these are a few of the languages that I've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks, as I've been to 17 countries I think I'm up to, on this crazy tour I've been doing, checking out various aspects of the project that we're doing. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about later on. And visiting some pretty incredible places, places like Mongolia, Cambodia, New Guinea, South Africa, Tanzania twice -- I was here a month ago.
Jambo, bonjour, zdraveite, trayo。这些是几种不同的语言, 我在过去六周里多多少少用到了它们。 我在进行一个非常疯狂的旅行,总共要跑十七个国家, 去为我们正在做的项目做各种各样的事。 我现在就要向你们介绍这个项目。 我也见到了各种绝妙的风土人情。 像是蒙古,柬埔寨,新几内亚,南非,我还来过两次坦桑尼亚。 一个月前来过一次。
And the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing, for lots of reasons. You see some incredible stuff. And you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe. And the thing that you really take away from that, the kind of surface thing that you take away from it, is not that we're all one, although I'm going to tell you about that, but rather how different we are. There is so much diversity around the globe. 6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people, all different colors, shapes, sizes. You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species.
这种旋风式的全球旅行的机会 是绝妙十足的,原因很多, (首先)你能长不少见识, 同时你还能比较不同的地区, 比较全球的人种。 最重要的是你意识到, 那种最明显的感觉就是, 并不是我们又多么像一个整体,尽管我想和你们讨论这方面。 而是我们彼此有多么的不同。 放眼全球多种多样的人, 六十五亿人口,不同肤色,不同高矮胖瘦, 讲着六千种不同的语言。 当你做这样的旅行,当你在任何大城市的大街上漫步, 你会被人类的多样性所惊服。
How do we explain that diversity? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, is how we're using the tools of genetics, population genetics in particular, to tell us how we generated this diversity, and how long it took. Now, the problem of human diversity, like all big scientific questions -- how do you explain something like that -- can be broken down into sub-questions. And you can ferret away at those little sub-questions.
怎样解释这种多样性呢? 这正是我今天要讲的。 就是我们怎样用遗传学的方法, 特别是人口遗传学,来说明我们是怎么进化出多样性的, 还有花了多长时间产生多样性的。 现在,人类多样性的问题, 就像是所有那些重要的科学问题, 很难一下子说清楚。 我们可以把这个大问题分解成一些小问题, 然后你就能一个个地解决。
First one is really a question of origins. Do we all share a common origin, in fact? And given that we do -- and that's the assumption everybody, I think, in this room would make -- when was that? When did we originate as a species? How long have we been divergent from each other?
第一个小问题其实是关于人类的起源。 我们到底是不是从同一个起点来的? 如果是的话,这也是每个人都赞同的假说, 又是在什么时候? 从什么时候我们作为一个物种开始存在? 我们已经(从一个起源)开始分支了多长时间?
And the second question is related, but slightly different. If we do spring from a common source, how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe, and in the process generate all of this diversity, the different ways of life, the different appearances, the different languages around the world?
第二个小问题和这个有关,但是很不一样。 那就是如果我们都是从一个起点来的, 又是怎样散布到世界的各个角落, 怎样一步步产生不同的人种, 不同的生活方式,不同的样貌, 不同的语言的呢?
Well, the question of origins, as with so many other questions in biology, seems to have been answered by Darwin over a century ago. In "The Descent of Man," he wrote, "In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It's therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere."
关于起源的问题,就像很多其他生物学上的问题一样, 看起来已经被达尔文在一百年前就回答了。 在他的书“人类的起源”中,他写道: “在世界的每个区域,现存的哺乳动物 都和同一区域灭绝的物种紧密相连。 因此很有可能非洲从前有类人猿,现在灭绝了, 而它们和大猩猩以及黑猩猩相关。 这两个物种是现今人类的最接近的物种, 由此可见,人类的早期祖先 最有可能生活在非洲大陆上,而不是别处。”
So we're done, we can go home -- finished the origin question. Well, not quite. Because Darwin was talking about our distant ancestry, our common ancestry with apes. And it is quite clear that apes originated on the African continent. Around 23 million years ago, they appear in the fossil record. Africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time, due to the vagaries of plate tectonics, floating around the Indian Ocean. Bumped into Eurasia around 16 million years ago, and then we had the first African exodus, as we call it. The apes that left at that time ended up in Southeast Asia, became the gibbons and the orangutans. And the ones that stayed on in Africa evolved into the gorillas, the chimpanzees and us. So, yes, if you're talking about our common ancestry with apes, it's very clear, by looking at the fossil record, we started off here.
这样问题就解决了,我们可以回家了,我们回答了起源的问题。 等等,并没有完全回答。因为达尔文讲的是我们的远祖, 我们和猿类共享的始祖。 很明显猿类是从非洲大陆来的。 根据化石记载它们是在两百三十万年前出现的。 非洲已经和其他大陆分隔开了。 由于捉摸不定的的板块构造,非洲在印度洋上漂浮, 大约一百六十万年前,撞到欧亚板块上, 我们就有了第一次的所谓的“非洲物种外流”。 那时候离开非洲的猿类到达了东南亚, 演变成了长臂猿和猩猩。 那些留在非洲的猿类 演变成了大猩猩,黑猩猩,和我们人类。 所以,如果你指的是我们和猿类的共同祖先, 只要看化石纪录,毫无疑义地,我们是从非洲来的。
But that's not really the question I'm asking. I'm asking about our human ancestry, things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room. If they were peering over your shoulder, you wouldn't leap back, like that. What about our human ancestry? Because if we go far enough back, we share a common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. DNA ties us all together, so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back -- over a billion years. What we're asking about though is human ancestry. How do we study that?
但是这并不是我想知道的问题。 我指的是原始人类, 从它们变成为人类开始算, 就好像是原始人类现在就在这个房间, 如果它们就在你边上, 你不会吓得往后退。什么是原始人类? 如果我们追溯起源。 我们能够找到和世界上所有生命的共同起源。 DNA把我们联系起来,我们甚至和梭鱼, 细菌,蘑菇,都有共同祖先,如果你真的是往回找上十亿年的话。 我们这里讲的是原始的人类祖先。 怎么研究呢?
Well, historically, it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology. Digging things up out of the ground, and largely on the basis of morphology -- the way things are shaped, often skull shape -- saying, "This looks a little bit more like us than that, so this must be my ancestor. This must be who I'm directly descended from."
古生人类学已经研究了很多年了, 他们挖掘古生物遗迹, 大部分的分类是根据样貌, 古生物是什么样子的,多数是根据头骨的样子,好比说 “这个比那个看起来更像我们一点点,那么这个想必是我的祖先。 我想必是从这个起源演化来的。”
The field of paleoanthropology, I'll argue, gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but it doesn't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists. What do I mean by that? You're looking at a great example here. These are three extinct species of hominids, potential human ancestors. All dug up just west of here in Olduvai Gorge, by the Leakey family. And they're all dating to roughly the same time. From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus -- now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time. That means that not all three could be my direct ancestor. Which one of these guys am I actually related to? Possibilities about our ancestry, but not the probabilities that we're really looking for.
我得说,古生人类学 向我们提供了很多非常有价值的可能性, 但是没有给我们提供每种可能性的概率,那才是科学家们真正需要的。 怎么说呢? 这里是个很好的例子: 三个灭绝了的原始人种, 每个都可能是人类的祖先。 它们都是在 Olduvai Gorge 以西被 Leakey 家族发掘的。 它们也都是从差不多同一个时期来的。 从左到右,我们有直立人,能人 和南方古猿 — 现在叫做鲍氏傍人的, 也就是更新世灵长类动物。三个已经灭绝的物种,存在于同一个空间,同一个时间。 这说明不可能每一个都是我们的祖先。 到底哪一个是呢? 都有可能性,但是我们要看的是哪个机率更大。
Well, a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently -- again, largely skull shape. The first person to do this systematically was Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist, who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet. You think you've got a tough job? And he did a pretty good job. He categorized about 12,000 species in "Systema Naturae." He actually coined the term Homo sapiens -- it means wise man in Latin. But looking around the world at the diversity of humans, he said, "Well, you know, we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories." And he talked about Africans and Americans and Asians and Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he termed "Monstrosus," which basically included all the people he didn't like, including imaginary folk like elves.
另一个方法是看人体形态 这也是最近才有的方法 — 大部分是靠头骨的形状。 第一个系统地做这件事的人叫 Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, 是个瑞士植物学家, 十八世纪的人,自己一个人 把地球上所有存在的生物分了类。 你还抱怨你的工作难做么? 他还做得很不错。 他把大约一万两千种不同的物种分了类。 还创造了“智人”这个名词 — 拉丁文中的意思是“有智慧的人”。 但是看看世界上那么多不同的人种,他说: “你知道,我们看起来是差别细微的亚种,或者只是不同类的智人。” 他提到了非洲人,美洲人,亚洲人和欧洲人, 也公然地把所有他不喜欢的人种 一古脑儿归类成 “monstrosus”, 其中还包括了想象中的人物,比如精灵。
It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-Darwinian era. Except, if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity. Human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30, 40 years ago -- Carlton Coon is the best example -- had been diverging from each other -- this was in the post-Darwinian era -- for over a million years, since the time of Homo erectus. But based on what data? Very little. Very little. Morphology and a lot of guesswork.
我们很容易对这个结果嗤之以鼻, 虽然这个研究的意图是好的, 毕竟这是达尔文出现前十八世纪的比较愚昧的研究。 不过,如果你去上人类学的课, 大概二三十年前, 很多时候你还是学的同样的人类分类法呢。 人类种族,在三四十年前的人类学家来看 — Carlton Coon 是最好的例子 — 从直立人时代以来,已经相互分离了 — 这已经是后达尔文时代了 — 一百万年还不止。 但是有什么证据呢? 很少,几乎没有。形态学和很多猜想而已。
Well, what I'm going to talk about today, what I'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem. Instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry, digging things up out of the ground, possible ancestors, and saying it on the basis of morphology -- which we still don't completely understand, we don't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation --
我今天要介绍给大家的。 现在要讲的,是一个全新的研究方法。 不是光靠出去满处挖掘, 猜想谁是你可能的祖先, 就靠着谁长得像, 更别提我们还不太明白怎么确定谁长得像呢。 因为我们并不完全理解基因变异怎么导致了形态的改变。
what we need to do is turn the problem on its head. Because what we're really asking is a genealogical problem, or a genealogical question. What we're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today. And as any genealogist will tell you -- anybody have a member of the family, or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree, trace back in time? You start in the present, with relationships you're certain about. You and your siblings, you have a parent in common. You and your cousins share a grandparent in common. You gradually trace further and further back into the past, adding these ever more distant relationships. But eventually, no matter how good you are at digging up the church records, and all that stuff, you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall. A point beyond which you don't know anything else about your ancestors, and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance.
我们要做的是变被动为主动, 因为说到底这是一个家谱的研究。 或者说是家谱问题。 我们试图做的是给每个人画一个家谱, 就像家谱学家对你说的 — 有没有谁家族里有人,或者就是你自己, 试图追根溯源,画出家谱的? 你从确信对的亲属关系开始, 你和你的兄弟姐妹,同样的父母, 然后加上你的表亲,你们的祖父母是相同的。 你渐渐回溯到越来越早, 加上更多的远亲。 但是最终,不管你有多么能干,发掘了教堂的记载, 所有的来源,你还是会遇到一个家谱学家所说的“碰壁”。 也就是你实在找不出更多的信息了。 你会陷入历史的迷雾, 只能靠着细小的声音找寻出路。
Who were these people who came before? We have no written record. Well, actually, we do. Written in our DNA, in our genetic code -- we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species. And that's what we study.
这些人是谁?谁先谁后? 我们没有纸上记载。事实上,我们有记录保存下来。 信息都记在我们的DNA里,在我们的基因书中。 就像一本历史长卷,把我们带回过去, 带到我们人种最早的年代去。这就是我们要研究的。
Now, a quick primer on DNA. I suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist. It is a very long, linear molecule, a coded version of how to make another copy of you. It's your blueprint. It's composed of four subunits: A, C, G and T, we call them. And it's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint. How long is it? Well, it's billions of these subunits in length. A haploid genome -- we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes -- a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length. And the whole thing, if you add it all together, is over six billion nucleotides long. If you take all the DNA out of one cell in your body, and stretch it end to end, it's around two meters long. If you take all the DNA out of every cell in your body, and you stretch it end to end, it would reach from here to the moon and back, thousands of times. It's a lot of information.
现在,简单介绍一下DNA。 我猜不是每个听众都是遗传学家。 DNA是个非常长的线状物,一个如何复制你自己的密码书, 也是你的蓝图。 DNA有四个成分组成:A,C,G和T。 这四个成分的组合顺序决定了蓝图, DNA有多长?有上百亿个成分组成。 我们的基因是双份的,我们的染色体有一式两份, 每份基因有三十二亿核酸那么长, 如果你把所有的染色体连起来, 就有多于六十亿核酸长。 如果你把你体内一个细胞的DNA拿出来, 头尾相连,大概是两米长。 如果你把你体内每一个细胞的DNA都拿出来, 头尾相连,可以从地球到月球再回来, 往返成千上万次。这里包含了很多的信息。
And so when you're copying this DNA molecule to pass it on, it's a pretty tough job. Imagine the longest book you can think of, "War and Peace." Now multiply it by 100. And imagine copying that by hand. And you're working away until late at night, and you're very, very careful, and you're drinking coffee and you're paying attention, but, occasionally, when you're copying this by hand, you're going to make a little typo, a spelling mistake -- substitute an I for an E, or a C for a T.
当你复制这些DNA时,试图把信息传到下一代时,是个很难的工作。 想象你知道得最长的书,比如战争与和平, 乘上一百倍, 然后想象你手抄这些书, 直到深夜, 你非常非常小心,喝咖啡保持清醒, 你注意力高度集中,但是时不时地, 当你手抄的时候, 还是会出错 — 抄错字母。 本来是 I 写成了 E,本来是 C 写成了 T。
Same thing happens to our DNA as it's being passed on through the generations. It doesn't happen very often. We have a proofreading mechanism built in. But when it does happen, and these changes get transmitted down through the generations, they become markers of descent. If you share a marker with someone, it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past, the person who first had that change in their DNA. And it's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation, the pattern of these markers in people all over the world, and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history, that we've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today.
这种事情在DNA复制的时候也会发生。 不常发生,因为我们有查错和纠错的系统, 但是一旦发生了,这些改变会传到下一代, 刚好变成了世代相传的标签。 如果你和别人有一个相同标签, 这说明你们血脉相连。 都能连回到那个第一次产生这个标签的人。 通过观察基因变异的类型, 全世界人们携带的标签的类型, 来分析标签产生的年代, 正是我们用来给每个人创造家谱的方法。
These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home message?
这里有两个DNA片断,我们用的很多, 一个是线粒体DNA,总是从母亲那里来, 你从你妈妈那里得到线粒体DNA,你妈妈从她的妈妈那里得到, 一直追回到第一个人类女性。 还有就是Y染色体,雄性染色体, 能够追溯父系信息。 这屋里的每个人,这世界上的每个人, 都能在这些家谱里找到位置。 现在,即使这些是简化了的家谱, 它们还是很复杂,让我们用更简单的方法看, 把它们侧过来,汇总变成一棵树的样子, 下面有根上面有树枝。 到底说明什么?
Well, the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within Africa, among Africans. That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer. And what that means is that we originated in Africa. It's written in our DNA. Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa. And at some point in the past, a sub-group of Africans left the African continent to go out and populate the rest of the world.
你最先注意到的 是最深的世代, 是从非洲来的,非洲人。 这说明非洲人集聚了最长时间的 基因变异, 这说明了我们都是从非洲起源的。这是写在DNA里的。 每一个我们研究的DNA片断都在非洲内有更深的多样性。 过去的每个时期,一部分非洲人, 离开了非洲大陆,在世界的其他地方定居了。
Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person -- Mitochondrial Eve, you might have heard about her -- in Africa, an African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today.
现在的问题是,这发生在多久以前? 是在几百万年前么?如我们 从全世界这么多不同的人种来猜想的一样? 不是的。DNA把历史弄得很清楚, 在过去的二十万年中,我们有共同的祖先,同一个人, 线粒体 Eve — 你可能听说过她 — 在非洲。 这一个非洲女性,就是现今全世界多种多样的线粒体的起源。
But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y-chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago. That's only about 2,000 human generations, the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. Such an amazing story. We're all effectively part of an extended African family.
更令人惊奇的是, 如果你看 Y 染色体, 男性这边, Y 染色体亚当, 存在于六万年前。 从他数来只不过两千代的人类历史。 对于进化史来说,这不过是一眨眼间的事。 这告诉我们六万年前我们还都生活在非洲, 一个非洲男性 把 Y 染色体传给了全世界。 仅仅是过去的六万年里, 我们人类产生了这个令人难以置信的多样性。 多么令人惊叹。 我们都是这个非洲大家族的一部分。
Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? Well, that's a big question. These "why" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones, the ones that are tough to answer.
看起来这并不是很久以前,为什么我们早没有离开非洲大陆呢? 为什么直立人没有发展成不同的人种, 或者亚种,而是变成了现在世界上的种族? 为什么我们这么晚才从非洲出来? 这是个很重要的问题。这些“为什么”的问题。 尤其是对遗传学和人类史学来说,都一直是很重要的问题。 这些问题很难回答。
And so when all else fails, talk about the weather. What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough, getting very cold. The Northern Hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick.
所以我们把注意力转到气候的变化上。 六万年前,世界的气候是什么样的? 那时候是最后一个冰河时期的最糟糕的一个时候。 最后的一个冰河时期始于十二万年前, 开始不稳定,后来在七万年前加速, 从沉积物, 花粉类型,和氧同位素研究方面有很多证据。 在一万六千年前我们到达了最后的冰河时代, 但基本上从七万年前开始,气候变得很严酷。 变得很冷。北半球全是冰层, 纽约,芝加哥,西雅图,这些地区全在冰下。 英国大部分,整个斯堪的那维亚半岛,全被数千米的冰层覆盖。
Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet -- about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn -- and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. This is a paleo-climatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation.
那时,非洲是整个星球上最热带的大陆 — 大约百分之八十五处在巨蟹和摩羯座之间, 也没有什么冰河, 除了在东非的一些高山上。 那里发生了什么呢?我们没有被盖在冰下, 但是,非洲变得非常干燥。 这是个古气候图, 显示了七万年前到六万年前非洲的样子, 这是从所有我之前提到的证据拼起来的。 气候干燥的原因是冰层事实上从大气中吸收水分。 试着想象一下南极洲,简直就是个沙漠,没什么降水。
So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails.
所以当时整个世界都变得干燥了。 海平面下降,非洲变成了沙漠。 当时的撒哈拉沙漠比现在的大很多, 人类的居住地变成了很小的一块块, 和我们今天的活动范围相比。 遗传学的证据表明, 这时候的人类数量,大约七万年前, 掉到少于两千人。 我们差一点就灭绝了。我们就差一点点就完了。
And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period.
接着分支才发生的。这里有个很好的图解, 看到这些石器了么, 左边的这些是从非洲发掘的,来自大概一百万年前, 右边的这些是尼安德特人作的,他们是我们的远祖表亲, 并不是直系祖先,他们生活在欧洲。 他们在五万年六万年前灭绝了。 现在,冒着对观众中的 古人类学家以及人类学家不敬的危险, 这两种石器间基本上没什么进化。 左边的看起来和右边得很像。 我们处在进化休止期,始于一百万年前, 直到七万年前到六万年前左右。 这些工具没有怎么进化。 这个证据表明,人类的生活方式 在那段时间没有什么变化。
But then 50, 60, 70 thousand years ago, somewhere in that region, all hell breaks loose. Art makes its appearance. The stone tools become much more finely crafted. The evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species, at particular times of the year. The population size started to expand. Probably, according to what many linguists believe, fully modern language, syntactic language -- subject, verb, object -- that we use to convey complex ideas, like I'm doing now, appeared around that time. We became much more social. The social networks expanded.
但是五万年,六万年,或者七万年前,非洲的一些地方, 开始产生变化了。艺术开始出现, 石器工具做得精细了。 这些证据说明人类开始在一年中的某个时期, 捕食特定的生物。 人类的数量开始增长, 很有可能,根据很多语言学家所说, 完整的现代语言,句法语言 — 有主语,动词,宾语的 — 就像我现在用来的传达复杂信息的语言,也是这时候开始出现的。 我们变得更社会性了,社交网络开始变大,
This change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in Africa, and they allowed us to start to expand around the world. We've been talking at this conference about African success stories. Well, you want the ultimate African success story? Look in the mirror. You're it. The reason you're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in Africa -- probably somewhere in the region where we're sitting right now, around 60, 70 thousand years ago -- allowing us not only to survive in Africa, but to expand out of Africa. An early coastal migration along the south coast of Asia, leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago, reaching Australia very rapidly, by 50,000 years ago. A slightly later migration up into the Middle East. These would have been savannah hunters.
这种行为上的进化帮助我们在非洲气候变坏的时候存活下来, 也帮助我们开始迁移到全世界。 在这个会上我们讨论了很多非洲的成功之处, 这里,你想要听一个最基本的非洲成功的故事么? 照照镜子,你就是。今天你能够在这里存活, 是因为那时候在非洲人类脑子里的变化。 恐怕就发生在我们现在坐的地方, 六万或者七万年前。 这些变化让我们不光是在非洲存活,也迁移到了非洲之外。 早期的海岸线迁移,顺着非洲南海岸, 在六万年前离开非洲大陆, 五万年前抵达了澳洲。 稍晚一点,另一部分人迁移到了中东, 这些是所谓的草原猎手。
So those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours, you'll get to see what a real savannah is like. And it's basically a meat locker. People who would have specialized in killing the animals, hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs, moving up, following the grasslands into the Middle East around 45,000 years ago, during one of the rare wet phases in the Sahara. Migrating eastward, following the grasslands, because that's what they were adapted to live on.
你们有谁在开会后作旅行的, 你会看到真正的草原猎手是什么样子的。 他们基本上是嗜肉的, 进化成为特级的捕杀动物的人, 这些草原猎人猎杀动物,向北迁移, 在四万五千年前沿着草原进入中东。 那时撒哈拉有一个少见的湿润期。 接着他们向东迁移,还是沿着草原, 因为这是适合他们生活的气候,
And when they reached Central Asia, they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway, a grassland super-highway. The grasslands at that time -- this was during the last ice age -- stretched basically from Germany all the way over to Korea, and the entire continent was open to them. Entering Europe around 35,000 years ago, and finally, a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable, Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, during the last ice age -- temperature was at -70, -80, even -100, perhaps -- migrating into the Americas, ultimately reaching that final frontier.
接着他们到了亚洲中部 沿着这个草原高速路, 草原高速通道。 那时的草原,还是最后的冰河时期, 从德国一直延伸到韩国, 整个亚洲大陆都是草原。 人类在三万五千年前进入欧洲, 最后,一小部分跨越最严酷的气候, 来到了西伯利亚, 进入北极圈,还是在最后的冰河时期。 这时候气温是大约负七十华氏,或者负八十,甚至负一百。 他们到了美洲,基本上是最后的前沿。
An amazing story, and it happened first in Africa. The changes that allowed us to do that, the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us, allowing us to create novel cultures, allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one I've just been on.
这个是很动人的故事,最先起源是非洲。 这些变化给了我们机会, 进化出这个高度适应性的大脑,我们能带着走, 使我们有机会创造新的文化, 使我们有机会变得多种多样, 就像我在之前的旅行中看到的一样。
Now, that story I just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world, the great Paleolithic wanderings of our species. And that's the story that I told a couple of years ago in my book, "The Journey of Man," and a film that we made with the same title. And as we were finishing up that film -- it was co-produced with National Geographic -- I started talking to the folks at NG about this work. And they got really excited about it. They liked the film, but they said, "You know, we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins, where we all came from, using the tools of DNA to map the migrations around the world. You know, the study of human origins is kind of in our DNA, and we want to take it to the next level. What do you want to do next?" Which is a great question to be asked by National Geographic.
我给你讲的这个人类进化的故事,就像一个旋风式的旅行 一个人类如何迁移到整个世界的旅行,旧石器时代的奇迹。 这也是我在几年前 发表的书中讲的故事。“人类的旅程”,以及我们制作的同名电影中讲的故事。 当我们完成这部电影的时候 — 这部电影是和国家地理杂志合作的 — 我开始和国家地理杂志的同事们谈起我的研究。 他们觉得很激动,他们喜欢这部电影,但是他们问: “你知道,我们真的觉得 这时研究人类起源,研究我们从哪里来的的新潮流。 用这些DNA工具来做一个人类迁移的地图。 既然这个人类起源的研究都在我们的DNA中, 我们想进一步做这个故事。 你下一步的计划是什么?” 国家地理杂志问了个很好的问题。
And I said, "Well, you know, what I've sketched out here is just that. It is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet. And it's based on a few thousand people we've sampled from, you know, a handful of populations around the world. Studied a few genetic markers, and there are lots of gaps on this map. We've just connected the dots. What we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more -- hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world."
我说,你知道,我画的这个图只是 非常粗糙的,给你看我们在整个地球上是怎么迁移的。 这些数据只是从我们采样的几千个人中来的 只是世界各地很少的一点数据 我们只研究了几个基因标记,这个地图上还有很多的间隙。 我们只是连起了几个点而已。我们现在要做的, 是增加我们采样的人数,至少十倍, 我们需要成千上万世界各地的人的DNA样本。
And that was the genesis of the Genographic Project. The project launched in April 2005. It has three core components. Obviously, science is a big part of it. The field research that we're doing around the world with indigenous peoples. People who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost. So my ancestors come from all over northern Europe. I live in the Eastern Seaboard of North America when I'm not traveling. Where am I indigenous to? Nowhere really. My genes are all jumbled up. But there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the DNA results.
这才是刚刚是基因地理学的开始。 这个项目始于2005年四月, 包括三个核心项目,当然科学方面是一个。 另一个是实地考察,我们和世界各地的土著们做的 所谓土著是指在同一个地方生活了很长时间的人, 我们能够通过他们生活的地方建立地图的联系, 这是在我们大多数人身上做不到的。 比如我的祖先是从欧洲各地来的, 我本人定居在北美东海岸, 我的家乡是哪里呢?哪儿也不是。我的基因在地图上跳来跳去地混乱了。 但是有的土著们还能够追随到很远的祖先, 这给我们提供了机会把DNA结果联系起来。
That's the focus of the field research, the centers that we've set up all over the world -- 10 of them, top population geneticists. But, in addition, we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world. How often do you get to participate in a big scientific project? The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission.
这就是这个研究项目的重点。 我们在世界各地设了点, 十个点,都是顶尖的遗传学家。 更进一步,我们希望把这个科学研究向全世界所有人开放。 你多久一次能有机会参加一个大型科研项目? 就像是人类基因组计划,或者火星探索?
In this case, you actually can. You can go onto our website, Nationalgeographic.com/genographic. You can order a kit. You can test your own DNA. And you can actually submit those results to the database, and tell us a little about your genealogical background, have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort.
这次你有机会了。 你可以上我们的网站,Nationalgeographic.com/genographic 定一个匣子,用里面的东西你能测试自己的DNA。 你还能把结果提交给我们的数据库, 再告诉我们一些你的家庭历史 我们就会分析你的DNA数据,当作是这个科研的一部分。
Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project. The majority going to something we call the Legacy Fund. It's a charitable entity, basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational, cultural projects initiated by them. They apply to this fund in order to do various projects, and I'll show you a couple of examples.
这都不是为了赚钱的。所有的所得, 除去我们做测试和准备这个匣子的费用, 都用来支持这个计划。 大部分会用来当作保留费用, 这是用来做慈善事业的钱,本质上是一个给出经费的机构, 把钱给世界各地的土著们, 用来发展教育,文化。 他们订计划我们经费支持,他们把经费用在各种项目上。 让我给你们几个例子。
So how are we doing on the project? We've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world. The most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago, which has raised around five million dollars, the majority of which, at least half, is going back into the Legacy Fund.
现在这个项目在做什么呢?我们已经得到了两万五千个样本, 从全世界各地的人种上得到的。 最令人惊奇的公众的兴趣。 两年来二十一万人 购买了我们的匣子。 我们赚了五百万。 绝大部分的钱,回流注入了这个保留基金。
We've just awarded the first Legacy Grants totaling around 500,000 dollars. Projects around the world -- documenting oral poetry in Sierra Leone, preserving traditional weaving patterns in Gaza, language revitalization in Tajikistan, etc., etc. So the project is going very, very well, and I urge you to check out the website and watch this space.
我们刚刚给了第一个基金会五十万。 用于全球范围的文化项目,比如在塞拉利昂记录保存口头流传的诗歌, 在加沙保存传统的编织式样, 在塔克亚复兴当地语言,等等,等等。 这个项目进行得非常非常顺利。 而我在这里,鼓励大家都去访问我们的网页,关注我们的进展。
Thank you very much. (Applause)
谢谢大家。 (掌声)