A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

语言词汇

It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and greasiest food we can ɹnd, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears.

1. N-COUNTIf you go on a binge, you do too much of something, such as drinking alcohol, eating, or spending money. 放纵[非正式]

例：She went on occasional drinking binges.

2. V-IIf you binge, you do too much of something, such as drinking alcohol, eating, or spending money. 放纵[非正式]

例：I haven't binged since 1986.

例：They skip meals, eat processed foods at their computers, binge on Starbucks and crash from sugar and caffeine highs.

例：Governments binge on spending during booms and cut back harshly during busts.

例：Or binge on chocolate when Type 2 diabetes runs in our family.

If this sounds silly, bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many.

1. V-T. When a male animal, especially a horse, sires a young animal, he makes a female pregnant so that she gives birth to it. (尤指种马)生殖; 繁殖[技术]；做…的父亲；(公畜)生殖：

例：Comet also sired the champion foal out of Spinway Harvest.

例：to be sired by the poor 出身贫寒

2. 生产；创作；首创：

例：a sired method 首创之法

例：to sire a novel 写小说

One of the most glaring differences between the ancient foragers and their agricultural and industrial descendants is that foragers had very few artefacts to begin with, and these played a comparatively modest role in their lives. 明显/显著的差异

例：The other glaring difference between these and the other sites is that they require real money.

例：Finally, the most glaring difference between the sets of two Camp David peace talks relates to Jerusalem.

An archaeologist working 100,000 years from now could piece together a reasonable picture of Muslim belief and practice from the myriad objects he unearthed in a ruined mosque.

1. PHRASAL VERBIf you piece together the truth about something, you gradually discover it. 渐渐弄清 (真相)

例：They've pieced together his movements for the last few days before his death.

他们已经渐渐查明了他死前最后几天里的行踪。

例：In the following days, Frankie was able to piece together what had happened.

在接下来的几天里，弗朗姬能够渐渐弄清所发生的事情了。

2. PHRASAL VERBIf you piece something together, you gradually make it by joining several things or parts together. 拼凑

例： This process is akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.

例：Piecing together the puzzle of Cambodia was a way to piece together the puzzle of me.

例：We then went over the facts carefully, trying to piece together what had actually happened.

例：The Maserati's passenger and other witnesses are helping detectives piece together what happened, he said.

But we are largely at a loss in trying to comprehend the beliefs and rituals of ancient huntergatherers. 困惑不解：filled with bewilderment

例：Government officials are at a loss to understand why inward investment has dried up.

Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have – a handful of artefacts and cave paintings – can be interpreted in myriad ways.

PHRASAL VERBIf you go by something, you use it as a basis for a judgment or action. 遵照

例：If they prove that I was wrong, then I'll go by what they say.

They were ritually sacrificed – perhaps as part of the burial rites of the leader – and then entombed with pomp and circumstance.

V-TIf something is entombed, it is buried or permanently trapped by something. 掩埋; 埋藏[正式]

例：The city was entombed in volcanic lava.

例：The Tel, an artificial mountain, entombs Jericho's ancient past.

2. V-T When a person's dead body is entombed, it is buried in a grave or put into a tomb. 埋葬[正式][usu passive]

例：Neither of them had any idea how long the body had been entombed.

While some areas and some periods of time may have enjoyed peace and tranquillity, others were riven by ferocious conflicts.

ADJ If a country or organization is riven by conflict, it is damaged or destroyed by violent disagreements. 分裂的; 四分五裂的[usu v-link ADJ 'by/with' n]

例：The four provinces are riven by deep family and tribal conflicts.

例：As for the elite, what little is known suggests a regime riven by bickering.

例：The group, although riven by internal disputes, is sponsored by the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

例：Military and oil interests are dominated by one ethnic group, the Dinka, themselves riven by differences.

汉英积累

与...相比只是弹指一瞬间 are the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years

长满无花果的树 a tree groaning with figs

高层公寓 high-rise apartment

...的本能铭刻在基因里 The instinct (to gorge on high-calorie food) was hardwired into our genes.

意义深远 have far-reaching implications

认同父系血统的传承 reckoned descent from the father’s side

驮畜 pack animal

设陷阱 lay a (rabbit) trap

工人 factory hand

疾病的理想温床 ideal hotbeds for disease

乱葬坑 burial pits

段落节选

The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex. We should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a superficial acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor fiends – they were humans. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.

Finally, there’s the thorny question of the role of war in forager societies. Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers.

If the larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular events are largely irretrievable. When a Sapiens band first entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama. Unfortunately, nothing would have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilised bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions. We may extract from them information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance forged between neighbouring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits.

This curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history. These long millennia may well have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces. The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred – let alone describe them in detail.

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