万物简史 第644期:永不安分的类人猿(10)

（单词翻译）

Opponents of the multiregional theory reject it, in the first instance, on the grounds that it requires an improbable amount of parallel evolution by hominids throughout the Old World— in Africa, China, Europe, the most distant islands of Indonesia, wherever they appeared. Some also believe that multiregionalism encourages a racist¹ view that anthropology² took a very long time to rid itself of. In the early 1960s, a famous anthropologist³ named Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from more superior stock than others. This hearkened back uncomfortably to earlier beliefs that some modern races such as the African "Bushmen" (properly the Kalahari San) and Australian Aborigines were more primitive⁴ than others.

反对“多地区起源¨假说的人马上拒绝接受这种理论，其理由就是这种学说是建立在远古世界——非洲、中国、欧洲、极其偏远的印度尼西亚群岛-以及他们出现的任何地方——的人科动物是以一种并行不悖的方式进化的基础之上的，而这是不大可能的。一些人还认为这种学说助长了种族主义论调，而这正是人类学界长期以来所努力加以摒弃的。20世纪60年代初，一个名为卡尔顿·库恩的宾夕法尼亚大学著名人类学家认为，一些现代民族有着不同的起源，言外之意我们当中的一些人源自比别人更优异的族群，这是以前一种看法的回光返照，令人觉得不大舒服，那种看法认为非洲“丛林人”（确切地说是萨马拉桑人）、澳大利亚土著居民这样一些少数民族比别的民族更为原始。

Whatever Coon may personally have felt, the implication for many people was that some races are inherently more advanced, and that some humans could essentially⁵ constitute different species. The view, so instinctively⁶ offensive now, was widely popularized in many respectable places until fairly recent times. I have before me a popular book published by Time-Life Publications in 1961 called The Epic⁷ of Man based on a series of articles in Life magazine. In it you can find such comments as "Rhodesian man ... lived as recently as 25,000 years ago and may have been an ancestor of the African Negroes. His brain size was close to that of Homo sapiens." In other words black Africans were recently descended⁸ from creatures that were only "close" to Homo sapiens.

不管卡尔顿·库恩自己是怎么想的，在很多人看来，他的这种说法言外之意就是一些民族生来就是优等民族，有些人可以构成完全不同的种族。这种今天听上去令人十分反感的观点，直到不久以前还在许多体面的场合广为宣传。我手头就有一本时代一生活出版社1961年出版的很流行的书《人类的史诗》，它是根据《生活》杂志的一系列文章编撰而成的。在书里你可以读到这样的评论：“罗得西亚人……生活在近25000年前，可能是非洲黑人的祖先。他的脑量比较接近于智人。”换句话说，非洲黑人的祖先与智人仅仅是比较“接近”。