新托福听写训练 第25期

（单词翻译）

Listen to a discussion between two archeology students, they are preparing for class presentation.

I read the prehistoric¹ people had settled in villages in start farming when they could no longer survive just by hunting and gathering². The idea was that they pushed out of the best land as the population grew, most likely they had noticed that some seeds sprang out when they dropped them, so when the prehistoric people had to move to less productive area, they settled in permanent villages there and start planting seeds to keep from starving.

That was the thinking until a few years ago when archeologists found evidence that goes against that theory. The new idea is that farming developed in the richest land areas and the people who studied it weren't been threaten by starvation. Apparently³, successful hunters and gatherers are living in villages long before they started cultivating crops, this prepare start villages just wanted to have more stable foods supply.

What? You mean that people settled in villages where they were still hunting and gathering wild food to eat. How did the archeologists come to that conclusion?

Well, one way was a new more accurate method that dating a small piece or something like a grainof corn or wheat. You know, earlier archeologists couldn't date something that small so they have to date say the charcoal⁴ around it to get the estimated age.

So with the new technique to determine the age of the tiny sample, they found out the grain was older than they had thought.

No,just the opposite.They found out it was much younger, so that meant the mastication⁵ of grain probably occurred long after people had begun to live in villages.