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Lee Berger has spent his professional life searching for evidence of mankind's past.
李·伯杰整個職業生涯尋找人類過去的痕跡。
He is a paleo-anthropologist who with some help from National Geographic has been studying and searching for the fossil remains of our ancestors for nearly 20 years.
他是一位古人類學家，在《國家地理》雜志的幫助下，他研究尋找我們祖先的化石遺跡已經將近20年了。
He has done most of his work in Africa, but it was during a vacation stop in Palau, and a walk through one of the many caves in this area that he literally stumbled upon what could be a history-making find.
他的大部分工作都是在非洲完成的，但那是在帕勞度假期間，他在這個地區的洞穴中漫步，偶然有了一個可能創造歷史的發現。
"You see that, this is just packed full of buff, I mean you can actually see there are still some naturally exposed here. But what was cool here is we had a whole skull here."“你看，這里面全是軟皮，你可以看到這里還有一些自然暴露的東西。但我們發現了一個完整的頭骨，酷極了?！?/div>
Berger thinks these bones may be the remains of some of the earliest humans ever to populate these islands. Previous estimates date the earliest human habitation to about 29 hundred years ago, but all these bones existed above something called a flowstone. A flowstone is a common occurrence in caves where mineral-rich water flowing over the ground hardens in the stone. All of Berger's previous digging was another flowstone that dated back about 29 hundred years. Today he's returned and is going to break through the flowstone to see if there are bones underneath. "We are hoping that flowstone and consolidated sandstone took at least a few hundred years to form maybe longer than that. Hope is that these dates are gonna come out over the three-thousand-year mark."
伯杰認為這些骨頭可能是最早居住在這些島嶼上的人類的遺骸。之前的估計是人類最早的居住地出現在2900年前，但是這些骨頭都存在于一種叫做流石的東西上面。富含礦物質的水流過地面，在石頭中硬化。在這樣的洞穴中，流石很常見。伯杰之前一直在挖掘另一塊大約有2900年歷史的流石。今天他回來了，打算穿過流石看看下面是否有骨頭。“我們希望流石和固結砂巖至少需要幾百年的時間才能形成，也許比這還要長。希望能超過三千年。”
He finds no shortage of bone underneath the flowstone including a tooth and a piece of cranium. But what these bones begin to tell Berger has far-reaching implications beyond the dating. The bones that Berger has found has some very unusual characteristics, a reduced chin, large teeth and what might be a small brain-size, leading Berger to reconsider his notion of what humans can look like.
他發現流石下面有很多骨頭，包括一顆牙齒和一塊頭蓋骨。但這些骨骼包含的信息，除了年代以外，還有深遠的含義。伯杰所發現的骨骼有一些非常不尋常的特征，如下巴小、牙齒大，大腦可能更小，這使得伯杰重新考慮他對人類長相的看法。
"That's nice. We have found this small island population with all of these characters and that appears to be human that is pushing the published boundaries of human variation."
“那很好。我們發現這個島上的人有這么多的特征，這里的人類似乎在推翻人類變異的邊界。”
It might also have some implications for another set of bones found in the region, those of the tiny human that researchers dubbed "the hobbit". Its scientific name is Homo Floresiensis. And the researchers including Dean Falk from the University of Florida say it is so unique, it should be a separate species of human. The controversy of the hobbit is ongoing, but Berger's finding let him to believe that Flores might not be a separate species.
這可能還會對該地區發現的另一組骨骼產生一些影響，這些微小人類的骨骼，研究人員認為它們屬于“霍比特人”。它的學名是弗洛里斯人。佛羅里達大學的迪安·福爾克等研究人員說，它非常獨特，應該是一個單獨的人類物種。霍比特人的爭議還在繼續，但伯格爾的發現讓他相信弗洛雷斯可能不是一個單獨的物種。
"...and also making me personally consider my understanding of what is normal even variation.“…同時也讓我思考我對正常甚至變異的理解。
Berger's published a paper suggesting the bones are amazing because they show the incredible range of humans, in regards to size and shape. This new understanding of the potential of human variation might make us reconsider just how different the hobbits really are. The controversies will continue, but in the meantime, Berger will return.
伯杰發表的一篇論文表明，這些骨頭令人驚嘆，因為它們向我們展示了人類的大小和形狀能有多么令人難以置信。這種對人類變異可能的新理解可能會讓我們重新思考霍比特人到底有多不同。爭論還會繼續，但與此同時，伯杰會回來。
"What has struck me on this second scientific visit is how phenomenally little research has been done on these islands."
“在第二次科學訪問中，讓我印象深刻的是，關于這些島嶼，幾乎沒有進行任何研究。”
But Berger hopes to personally change that in the coming years, as he makes his way back to Palau, to continue his search for answers to our past.
但伯杰希望在接下來的幾年里，當他再來帕勞的時候，能親自改變這種狀況，繼續尋找我們過去的答案。
