Finding Fossil Man

We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas - legends handed down from one generation of story - tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologists wondered for a long time how to classify the Pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa. These tribes live by hunting, fishing and gathering, and they do not plant crops. The anthropologists made a mistake, because they thought these people were still in the Stone Age. They forgot that the Pygmies and Bushmen have been in contact with modern civilization for a long time. The Pygmies and Bushmen are not Stone Age people. They are modern people who have not yet learned to write.

我们从书籍中可以读到5000年前近东发生的事情，那里的人最早学会了写字。但直到现在，世界上仍有些地方，人们还不会书写。他们保存历史的唯一办法是将历史当作传说讲述，由讲述人一代接一代地将史实描述为传奇故事口传下来。这些传说很有用，因为它们能告诉我们一些以往人们迁移的情况。但是没有人能把他们所做的事情记载下来。人类学家们长期以来一直在思考如何对刚果盆地的俾格米人和非洲卡拉哈里沙漠的布须曼人进行分类。这些部落靠狩猎、捕鱼和采集为生，不种植庄稼。人类学家们犯了一个错误，因为他们认为这些人仍然处于石器时代。他们忘记了俾格米人和布须曼人已经和现代文明有了很长时间的接触。俾格米人和布须曼人并非石器时代的人，他们是尚未学会写字的现代人。