英譯漢
Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized that her passport was missing. In just a few hours, she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya: waitressing, doing secretarial work, temping at the post office in her hometown, Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast. Now all this was for naught, it seemed.
It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life — rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to science, to our sense of ourselves as a species — might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency representative, documents in hand, found her on the dock. “Incredible,” Goodall told me last month, recalling that day. “Amazing.”
Within two months of her arrival, Goodall met the paleontologist Louis Leakey — Nairobi was a small town for its white population in those days — and he immediately offered her a job at the natural-history museum where he was curator. He spent much of the next three years testing her capacity for repetitive work.
He believed in a hypothesis first put forth by Charles Darwin that humans and chimpanzees share an evolutionary ancestor. Close study of chimpanzees in the wild, he thought, might tell us something about that common progenitor. He was, in other words, looking for someone to live among Africa’s wild animals. One night, he told Goodall that he knew just the place where she could do it: Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, in the British colony of Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
In July 1960, Goodall boarded a boat and after a few hours motoring over the warm, deep waters of Lake Tanganyika, she stepped onto the pebbly beach at Gombe.
Her finding, published in Nature in 1964, that chimpanzees use tools — extracting insects from a termite mound with leaves of grass — drastically and forever altered humanity’s understanding of itself; man was no longer the natural world’s only user of tools.
After two and a half decades of living out her childhood dream, Goodall made an abrupt career shift, from scientist to conservationist.
1957年3月，當珍妮·古道爾(Jane Goodall)在倫敦碼頭候船時，她發(fā)現(xiàn)護照不見了。再有幾個小時，她就要出發(fā)第一次前往非洲。古道爾有個已經(jīng)遷往非洲內(nèi)羅畢郊外農(nóng)場生活的校友，知道古道爾從小的愿望就是要到非洲與野生動物朝夕相伴，遂邀請古道爾到內(nèi)羅畢自己家小住一陣。那年，古道爾22歲，為了攢夠肯尼亞之行的旅費，過去兩年，她在英國南部海濱城市伯恩茅斯(Bournemouth)老家做過服務生、文秘和郵局臨時工。現(xiàn)在，她的一切努力似乎都要白費了。
幸虧有人撿到她的護照，連同護照夾著折好了的由庫克(Cook)旅行社出具的行程單，一并送回到了庫克旅行社。一名庫克旅行社代表拿著這些證件材料，在碼頭找到了古道爾。這才有了古道爾后來的自然保護工作和科學研究，并改變了我們對人類自身這個物種的認識。如果沒人撿到，很難想象古道爾的人生軌跡會是哪般，“失而復得，真難以置信，”古道爾上個月告訴我時說，“這太神奇了。”
內(nèi)羅畢當年還是一座小鎮(zhèn)。在古道爾到達后不到兩個月，她見到了時任自然歷史博物館館長的人類學家路易士•李基(Louis Leakey)，李基請她到館里工作。在隨后的三年里，李基花了許多時間，檢驗古道爾開展重復性工作的能力。
李基相信查爾斯•達爾文最先提出的假設：即人類與黑猩猩都由同一個祖先進化而來。李基認為，在野外對黑猩猩進行詳細研究，或許會有一些關于這個共同祖先的發(fā)現(xiàn)。換句話說，他正在尋找一位可以與黑猩猩一起生活的人。一天晚上，李基告訴古道爾，他知道一個剛好可以研究黑猩猩的地方：位于英國殖民地坦噶尼喀(今坦桑尼亞)的貢貝溪黑猩猩保護區(qū)(Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve)。
1960年7月，古道爾登上了一艘小船，在溫暖的坦噶尼喀深湖上航行數(shù)小時后，在貢貝的一個鵝卵石沙灘登陸。
古道爾的研究發(fā)現(xiàn)刊登在1964年的《自然》期刊上。古道爾發(fā)現(xiàn)，黑猩猩會使用工具，即利用草葉從白蟻丘里勾到白蟻吃。這項發(fā)現(xiàn)徹底改變了人類一直以來對自身的認識。人類從此不再是自然界一個可以使用工具的動物。
古道爾用了25年時間去實現(xiàn)兒時的夢想，后來她突然放棄科研，從事自然保護工作。
