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Not only did these hardy people manage to exist through the long cold spells which killed many ferocious animals, but when the earth became warm and comfortable once more,prehistoric man had learned a number of things which gave him such great advantages over his less intelligent neighbors that the danger of extinction (a very serious one during the first half million years of man's residence upon this planet) became a very remote one.
這些強(qiáng)壯的人們不但度過了這次使很多兇猛的動(dòng)物死亡的長時(shí)間寒冷時(shí)期，而且在當(dāng)?shù)厍蛟俅巫兊门瓦m合居住的時(shí)候，史前人類也學(xué)到了很多知識(shí)。這些知識(shí)使得他們比他們的低智商的鄰居擁有了更多的優(yōu)勢(shì)，從而滅絕的危機(jī)（在人類開始在地球上生存的前五十萬年里都是一個(gè)很嚴(yán)重的危機(jī)）離他們更加遙遠(yuǎn)。
I told you how these earliest ancestors of ours were slowly plodding along when suddenly (and for reasons that are not well understood) the people who lived in the valley of the Nile rushed ahead and almost over night, created the first centre of civilisation.
我告訴你如何當(dāng)我們這些早期的祖先正在緩慢地沉重地前行的時(shí)候突然居住在尼羅河山谷的人們沖在了前面，在一夜之間創(chuàng)造了第一個(gè)文明的中心。
Then I showed you Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," which was the second great school of the human race. And I made you a map of the little island bridges of the Aegean Sea, which carried the knowledge and the science of the old east to the young west, where lived the Greeks.
然后我向你展示了米索不達(dá)米亞，"河流之間的土地"，這里是人類的第二個(gè)起源地。然后我讓你看了一副地中海上小的橋梁島嶼的地圖。這些島嶼橋梁將古老東方的科學(xué)知識(shí)傳遞到了地處西方的希臘。
Next I told you of an Indo-European tribe, called the Hellenes, who thousands of years before had left the heart of Asia and who had in the eleventh century before our era pushed their way into the rocky peninsula of Greece and who, since then, have been known to us as the Greeks.
接下來我給你們講述了一個(gè)被稱為古希臘的印歐部落。他們?cè)趲浊昵熬碗x開了亞洲的中心地帶，在公元前十一世紀(jì)躋身到了多巖石的希臘半島，自從那時(shí)他們就變成了人們所熟知的希臘人。
And I told you the story of the little Greek cities that were really states, where the civilisation of old Egypt and Asia was transfigured (that is a big word, but you can "figure out" what it means) into something quite new, something that was much nobler and finer than anything that had gone before.
然后我給你講述了小的希臘城堡的故事，在這里古希臘和亞洲的文明被美化(這是一個(gè)很復(fù)雜的詞，但是你能夠查出來它的意思)成新的，比以前逝去的文明更加神圣的事物。
