Finally, but perhaps above all, human nature is a factor in all this. Scientists have a natural tendency to interpret finds in the way that most flatters their stature. It is a rare paleontologist indeed who announces that he has found a cache of bones but that they are nothing to get excited about. Or as John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer."
最后，在這一切中也許是最重要的，是人性的因素。科學家總是很自然地傾向于將他們的發現以最有利于確立他們聲譽的方式加以闡釋。很少有哪位古生物學家在聲稱發現一批骨頭時會說他的發現是沒有什么了不起的。正如約翰·里德在他的《缺失的環節》一書中實事求是地所說的那樣：“發現者在首次解釋新證據的時候往往都會說這證實了自己事先的想法，這是很有意思的。”
All this leaves ample room for arguments, of course, and nobody likes to argue more than paleoanthropologists. "And of all the disciplines in science, paleoanthropology boasts perhaps the largest share of egos," say the authors of the recent Java Man —a book, it may be noted, that itself devotes long, wonderfully unselfconscious passages to attacks on the inadequacies of others, in particular the authors' former close colleague Donald Johanson. Here is a small sampling:
所有這些都肯定為日后的爭論留出了很大的空間，也沒有任何人比古人類學家更喜歡爭論的了。“在所有科學家中，古人類學家也許是把自尊發揮到極致的一類人。“最近出版的《爪哇人》一書的作者們這樣說道。該書一個值得一提的特點，就是用了大段篇幅，毫不掩飾她對別人，尤其是對他們以前的好友加同事唐納德·約翰森的缺點進行了批評。下面就是其中的一小段：
In our years of collaboration at the institute he [Johanson] developed a well-deserved, if unfortunate, reputation for unpredictable and high-decibel personal verbal assaults, sometimes accompanied by the tossing around of books or whatever else came conveniently to hand.
我們在研究所共事的時候，他（約翰森）不幸染上了一種喜怒無常、大聲呵斥人的習慣，有時還伴以隨手扔書本或手邊任何東西的劇烈動作。
So, bearing in mind that there is little you can say about human prehistory that won't be disputed by someone somewhere, other than that we most certainly had one, what we think we know about who we are and where we come from is roughly this:
因此，請牢牢記住，有關史前人類史，你很難說還有什么問題不會在某人某地引起爭議。我們最有把握的只有這么一點，那就是我們認為我們知道我們是誰，我們從什么地方來，大情況如下：
For the first 99.99999 percent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were, we were. Then about seven million years ago something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna.
作為生物，我們在99.99999%的歷史時期和非洲黑猩猩有著共同的家譜。有關史前的非洲黑猩猩，我們幾乎一無所知，可是不管它們的情況是怎樣的，都和我們的祖先別無二致。接著，大約700萬年前，某種具有決定意義的事情發生了。一群新的動物走出非洲熱帶森林，開始在廣闊的大草原上四處走動。
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