第一册 史前-开始 《企鹅出版社丛书：世界历史》作者：J.M. 罗伯特 第四版

BOOK TWO, Chapter 5 The Beginnings of Civilizations in Eastern Asia, Ancient Chinaof <> by J.M. Roberts The Fourth Edition

翻译：风中琪云 （校对于2017/11/15)

https://erenow.com/common/NewHistoryoftheWorld/2.html

BOOK ONE

第一册

Before History - Beginnings

史前-开始

When does History begin? It is tempting to reply ‘In the beginning’, but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to be unhelpful. As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. We can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of vertebrates, or even to the photo synthetic cells and other basic structures which lie at the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet and even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not ‘history’.

历史开始于何时？' 从一开始 '是一个吸引人的回答 。但像许多明显的答案它很快就没有帮助了。正如一位伟大的瑞士历史学家曾经在另外一处中指出的那样, 历史是一个你不能从头开始的主题。我们可以追溯人类后裔的起源一直到脊椎动物出现的时候, 甚至到光合作用细胞和其它生命伊始时的基本结构。我们仍然还可以继续前进, 直到形成了这个星球的几乎不可想象的剧变, 甚至宇宙的起源。然而, 这些都不是 ' 历史 '。

Common sense helps here: history is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have histories, while human beings do. Even when historians write about a natural process beyond human control, such as the ups and downs of climate, or the spread of a disease, they do so only because it helps us to understand why men and women have lived (and died) in some ways rather than others.

常识在这里就有所帮助: 历史是人类的故事, 它所做的, 遭受过痛苦或享受的幸福。我们都知道, 狗和猫没有历史像人类那样。即使历史学家们记录了一个超越人类控制的自然过程, 例如气候的起伏或疾病的传播, 历史学家这样做只是因为它能帮助我们理解为什么男人和女人们或过上某种方式而不是其它的生活(和死亡)。

This suggests that all we have to do is to identify the moment at which the first human beings step out from the shadows of the remote past. It is not quite as simple as that, though. First, we have to know what we are looking for, but most attempts to define humanity on the basis of observable characteristics prove in the end arbitrary and cramping, as long arguments about ‘ape-men’ and ‘missing links’ have shown. Physiological tests help us to classify data but do not identify what is or is not human. That is a matter of a definition about which disagreement is possible. Some people have suggested that human uniqueness lies in language, yet other primates possess vocal equipment similar to our own; when noises are made with it which are signals, at what point do they become speech? Another famous definition is that man is a tool-maker, but observation has cast doubt on our uniqueness in this respect, too, long after Dr Johnson scoffed at Boswell for quoting it to him.

这表明我们所要做的就是确定第一群人类从遥远过去的阴影中走出来的时刻。当然也不是那么简单。首先, 我们必须知道我们在寻找什么, 但大多数在可观察的特征基础上定义人类的尝试一定会被最终证明过于随意和牵强, 因为关于 ' 猿人 ' 和 ' 缺失的链接 ' 的争论存在已久。生理测试帮助我们对数据进行分类, 但不能决定什么是或者不是人类。这是一个关于哪些分歧是可能的问题。有些人认为人类的独特性在于语言, 而其他灵长类动物则拥有与我们相似的发声器官;当噪声和信号一起发声, 它们什么时候变成为谈话？另一个著名的定义是人是一个工具制造者, 但观察也对我们这方面的独特性产生了怀疑； 很早之前约翰逊博士就嘲笑博斯维尔曾引用这句他的话（译注：没有查到这是那两位大咖）。

What is surely and identifiably unique about the human species is not its possession of certain faculties or physical characteristics, but what it has done with them. That, of course, is its history. Humanity’s unique achievement is its remarkably intense level of activity and creativity, its cumulative capacity to create change. All animals have ways of living, some complex enough to be called cultures. Human culture alone is progressive; it has been increasingly built by conscious choice and selection within it as well as by accident and natural pressure, by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited. Human history began when the inheritance of genetics and behaviour which had until then provided the only way of dominating the environment was first broken through by conscious choice. Of course, human beings have never been able to make their history except within limits. Those limits are now very wide indeed, but they were once so narrow that it is impossible to identify the first step which took human evolution away from the determination of nature. We have for a long time only a blurred story, obscure both because the evidence is fragmentary and because we cannot be sure exactly what we are looking for.

对于人类物种来说, 肯定存在的并且可被识别的不是它拥有某些能力或物理特征, 而是人类利用它们所做的一切。这当然也就是人类的历史。人类独特的成就是其超出一般的活动水平，创造力和它的累积的能力创造的变化。所有的动物都有其生存的方式, 有些复杂到甚至可以被称为具有文化。但只有人的文化是不断进步的;它越来越多地建立在的有意识的选择，以及偶然和自然的压力上, 并通过积累的经验和知识来增加人类可利用的资本。人类历史开始于此：那时提供了唯一的方式去主宰环境的基因和行为继承第一次被有意识的选择打破。当然, 人类一直能够在种种限制之内制造他们的历史。这些限制现在确实非常广泛, 但它们曾经是如此的狭隘以至于我们不能确定那一步是人类从自然界的主导地位中走出来的第一步。我们很长一段时间只是拥有一个模糊不清的故事, 模糊既是因为证据是零碎的, 也是因为我们不能确定到底在寻找什么。

-End