TED演讲： 语言如何改变人类(3)

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　　is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. 是它们缺乏心理学家和人类学家所谓的社会学习能力

　　They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. 它们似乎缺乏向别人学习的能力，通过照搬或模仿或者仅仅观察

　　As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas or learn from others' mistakes -- benefit from others' wisdom. 理所当然，它们无法改进他人的想法，或者从别人错误中吸取教训，汲取别人的智慧

　　And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. 所以它们只是单纯做同一件事重复一遍又一遍

　　In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back 事实上，如果我们能跨越一百万年，然后再追溯回来

　　and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing 这些黑猩猩肯定还在做着同样的事

　　with the same sticks for the termites¹ and the same rocks to crack open the nuts. 用同样的棍子抓着白蚁，用同样的石头砸着坚果

　　Now this may sound arrogant², or even full of hubris³. How do we know this? 也许这听上去有些傲慢，甚至狂妄自大。我们怎么知道这些的？

　　Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. 因为我们的祖先--直立人就是这样

　　These upright apes evolved on the African savanna⁴ about two million years ago, 约二百万年前，这些直立猿人在非洲的热带稀树草原进化

　　and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. 他们造出了精巧的手斧，能完全贴合手形

　　But if we look at the fossil record, 但如果我们查看化石

　　we see that they made the same hand axe⁵ over and over and over again for one million years. 会发现他们造着同样的手斧，重复着，持续了一百万年

　　You can follow it through the fossil record. 你可以通过各年代的化石看到

　　Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, 现在我们可以做几个关于猿人生存时间和他们的世代的猜想

　　that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. 在约四万代的时间里，从父辈到子辈，以及周围人的观察中，手斧没有任何改进

　　It's not even clear that our very close genetic⁶ relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. 我们甚至不太清楚，我们的近亲--尼安德特人是否具备社会学习能力

　　Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, 当然他们的工具比猿人要复杂得多

　　but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia. 但在30万年时间里，他们也只表现出很少的变化，那些尼安德特人生活在欧亚大陆。

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