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Temperatures increased by as much as seven degrees centigrade in a hundred years, and sea levels rose by over 100 metres. Ice turned to water and snow gave way to grass, and the result was slow but profound changes in the way that humans lived. Over the course of this week, I will be covering about seven thousand years of human history when, as the Ice Age ended, people in many different parts of the world began to breed animals, grow plants and eat differently.
百年之內氣溫上升高達七攝氏度，海平面上升超過三百英尺，即一百米。冰川融化成水流，積雪讓位給綠草。這過程是緩慢的，然后給人類生活方式帶來的改變卻是深遠的。在本周的各期目里，我將涵蓋人類歷史之河中將近七千年的歷史；當冰河時代結束，全球各地的人類開始了繁殖牲畜、種植莊稼，而且飲食方式也大大改觀了。
Ten thousand years ago, the sound of daily life began to change across the world, as new rhythms of grinding and pounding prepared the new foods that were going to change our diets and our landscapes. For a long time, our ancestors had used fire to roast meat but, in the sense that we would use the word today, they were now 'cooking'.
一萬年前，日常生活中與人類朝夕相伴的聲音在全世界范圍內都改變了，隨著人類開始采用新方式來準備新食物，真可謂是日日砧杵動，家家搗捶聲了，而我們的飲食與周遭環境也將迎來新改觀。漫漫歲月中，曾幾何時，我們祖先們已經學會了取火燒肉。也許某種意義上，按我們現代人的說法，他們現在會進行“烹飪”了。
There's an enormous range of objects in the British Museum that we could have chosen to illustrate this particular moment in human history, when people literally start putting down roots and cultivating plants that will feed them all year round.
于是人類真真正正地開始落地生根，培育起莊稼，這些植物將能夠常年到頭為他們提供食物；而在大英博物館數量龐大的藏品中，能被挑選出來描繪這特殊歷史時刻的物品，簡直是隨手可得。
The beginning of this sort of farming is a process that seems to have happened in many different places at more or less the same time, and we've recently discovered that one of these places was Papua New Guinea, that huge island just to the north of Australia, where this bird-shaped stone pestle comes from.
這種耕作方式的開始，幾乎是一個在全球范圍內同步發生的過程；我們最近發現的這些地方之一便是巴布亞新幾內亞，那座澳大利亞以北的巨大島嶼，我們這鳥形杵就是從那里出土的。
We think it's about eight thousand years old, but a pestle then would have been used exactly as it is now - to grind food in a mortar and break it down, so that you can make it edible.
我們估計它大概有八千年的歷史，一根舂杵，縱使歷練悠悠歲月，不變的是它當初的使用功能；它仍然可以勝任研磨研缽里食物的工作，供人們食用。
It's a big pestle, it stands just over a foot tall about 35 cm, and the business end is a stone bulb, about the size of a cricket ball, and you can feel that it's been much used. Above the bulb, the shaft is very easy to grasp and the upper part of the handle, or the shaft, has been shaped in a way that's got nothing to do with making food at all - it looks like a slender, elongated bird with wings outstretched and a long neck dipping forward; it looks a bit like Concorde.
這根舂杵滿大的，直立起來大概有一英尺高，約三十五厘米長，它的下頭是一個大石球，板球大小，看得出被常年使用過。石球上端的長柄很好抓取，這長柄或桿子的上端部分，卻被塑造成一種與舂搗谷物無關的造型，它看上去像一只纖細而被拉長的鳥，張開雙翅，長長的脖子優雅地彎向前，看上去真有點像只協和式飛機。
We're very familiar now with the idea that making food unites us, either as a family or a society, and we all know how much family memory and emotion is bound up in the pots and pans and wooden spoons of childhood. These sorts of associations seem to date from around ten thousand years ago; from the very beginning of cooking implements, roughly the period of our pestle. The chef Madhur Jaffrey is still very attached to her pestle, which her mother gave her when she left India, and she came to look at ours:
現在眾所周知，是食物將我們團結起來，構成家庭或者社會，而且大家都有多么親切的關于家的記憶與情感，那歲月中鍋碗瓢盆與木湯匙的童年。這樣子的情感紐帶似乎早在一萬年前就開始形成了，在烹飪廚具開始被運用起來的最早期，大概與我們這根舂杵是同一時代的。廚師梅赫爾·杰弗瑞仍舊相當依戀她的舂杵，那是當年她離開印度時，她母親送給她的。當她觀察我們的這把舂杵時，說道
