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But all of this overlooked the more or less infinite capacity for surprise offered by the ancient Mungo people of western New South Wales.
但是，在發生這一切的過程中，人們沒有想到新南威爾士州西部的古蒙戈人在某種程度上具有提供大家意想不到的信息的無限本事。
In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that
2001年初，澳大利亞國立大學的桑恩和他的同事們宣布，
they had recovered DNA from the oldest of the Mungo specimens—now dated at 62,000 years
他們從一個最古老的蒙戈人標本——生活于62000年前——中提取了DNA，
and that this DNA proved to be "genetically distinct."
研究表明，這種DNA“有著與眾不同的基因特點”。
The Mungo Man, according to these findings, was anatomically modern—just like you and me—but carried an extinct genetic lineage.
根據這些發現，蒙戈人在解剖結構上是現代人——就像你和我，卻具有一種已經滅絕了的基因系列。
His mitochondrial DNA is no longer found in living humans, as it should be if, like all other modern people,
他的線粒體DNA在活著的人身上再也找不到，而要是他像所有別的現代人
he was descended from people who left Africa in the recent past.
那樣是在不太遙遠的過去離開非洲的人類的后裔，那是應該找得到的。
"It turned everything upside down again," says Thorne with undisguised delight.
“這再一次使一切都顛倒過來。”桑恩顯然很開心。
Then other even more curious anomalies began to turn up.
接著，別的更古怪的異常情況出現了。
Rosalind Harding, a population geneticist at the Institute of Biological Anthropology in Oxford, while studying betaglobin genes in modern people,
牛津大學生物人類學研究所的人類遺傳學家羅莎琳德.哈丁在研究現代人類球蛋白基因時發現了兩個變異體，
found two variants that are common among Asians and the indigenous people of Australia,
這種變異體在亞洲人和澳大利亞土著人身上很常見，
but hardly exist in Africa.
而在非洲人身上卻幾乎不存在。
The variant genes, she is certain, arose more than 200,000 years ago not in Africa,
她確信這種不同的基因產生于20萬年前，但不是出現在非洲
but in east Asia—long before modern Homo sapiens reached the region.
而是在東亞——遠在現代智人到達這一地區之前。
The only way to account for them is to say that ancestors of people now living in Asia included archaic hominids—Java Man and the like.
對此所能作出的惟一合理的解釋是，現在的亞洲人的祖先中包括古代人科動物——爪畦人等。
Interestingly, this same variant gene—the Java Man gene, so to speak—turns up in modern populations in Oxfordshire.
有趣的是，同樣的變異基因——姑且說成是爪哇人基因——出現在了牛津郡的現代人中。
Confused, I went to see Harding at the institute,
我感到有些困惑，因此我去研究所拜見了哈丁女士。
which inhabits an old brick villa on Banbury Road in Oxford, in more or less the neighborhood where Bill Clinton spent his student days.
研究所設在牛津班伯里德路一所古老的磚型別墅里。
