雅思阅读 49: The First Long Walk Out of Africa（走出非洲的第一次长途跋涉）

改编由 Smithsonian Magazine / ScienceDaily / Discover Magazine（2025）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-top-human-evolution-discoveries-of-2025-from-the-intriguing-neanderthal-diet-to-the-oldest-western-european-face-fossil-180987936/

Reading Passage

A. For much of the twentieth century, the story of how humans first left Africa had a simple shape. Around 1.8 million years ago, a species with long legs, large brains and a taste for meat — Homo erectus — walked out of the Rift Valley, crossed the deserts of the Middle East and eventually reached Java, China and Europe. The evidence was clean: fossil skulls from Dmanisi, in the republic of Georgia, dated to about 1.8 million years, and simple stone tools scattered along the presumed route. Everything fitted. Then, in the last few years, new dates from sites as far apart as central China, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and the Turkish coast have begun to complicate that picture. The first dispersal out of Africa, it now appears, was neither as late, nor as single, nor as restricted to Homo erectus, as the textbooks claimed. Some of the new evidence is controversial, and critics argue that the dates have been pushed too far. But the accumulation of independent finds, each using a different dating method, is forcing a genuine rethink of one of the longest-standing narratives in human origins.

B. The most surprising new evidence comes from China. Fossils previously recovered near the town of Yunxian, in Hubei province, were long thought to be around one million years old. In 2025, a team of Chinese and French geologists redated the fossil-bearing sediments using a combination of magnetic stratigraphy — identifying the known pattern of ancient magnetic reversals in the rock — and burial dating, which measures the decay of rare isotopes since the sediments were last exposed to cosmic rays. They arrived at an age closer to 2.1 million years. That is more than three hundred thousand years older than Dmanisi. If the new date holds, the hominin represented by the Yunxian skulls was already in eastern Asia before Homo erectus had unambiguously left Africa. The implication is that an earlier, smaller-brained member of our genus — possibly Homo habilis or a close relative — made the crossing long before the classic erectus dispersal. Stone tools found in northern China, dated independently to between 2.43 and 2.1 million years ago, are consistent with that interpretation, though they have not yet been found in direct association with a fossil. The Yunxian skulls themselves, which had been kept in a provincial museum since the 1980s, were never fully described until the redating brought them back to international attention.

C. A second line of evidence comes from sea crossings. For decades, large-scale open-water journeys were regarded as a hallmark of anatomically modern humans, who reached Australia by boat roughly 65,000 years ago. But in August 2025, archaeologists reported stone tools on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dated to at least 1.04 million years — half a million years earlier than the previous record from the same island. Sulawesi is separated from the Asian mainland by deep water that even during glacial low stands, when so much water was locked up in ice that sea level dropped more than a hundred metres, could not be walked across. Whoever made those tools must therefore have built rafts or boats and crossed dozens of kilometres of open sea, more than a million years before Homo sapiens evolved. The finding forces a rewrite of what we thought we knew about early hominin cognitive capacity, and about the role of seafaring in the initial peopling of island South-East Asia. The tools themselves are simple flakes, not elegant craft products, but their very simplicity is the point: no sophisticated boatbuilding was required, only the confidence to push off from shore.

D. A third discovery, reported in October 2025, concerns the route into Europe itself. Traditional maps of early human expansion placed the entry point through the Levant and the Balkans, following the so-called "fertile crescent" corridor. But a survey along the Ayvalık coast of western Turkey, on the eastern shore of the Aegean, has now uncovered 138 Palaeolithic tools across ten sites, many of them in landscapes now drowned by the sea. During the last ice age, when sea levels were more than a hundred metres lower, a now-submerged land bridge connected the Turkish peninsula to the Greek island archipelago. The tool assemblages suggest that this corridor was used repeatedly, possibly by Homo heidelbergensis and later by early Neanderthals, tens of thousands of years before the modern-human expansion into Europe proper. The researchers have called for underwater surveys to test whether even earlier sites lie on the submerged continental shelf. Similar drowned landscapes off the coasts of Britain and Doggerland are now known to have been occupied, but their artefacts lie beneath metres of silt.

E. The emerging picture is messy. The first dispersal out of Africa was not a single event by a single species at a single time, but a series of crossings by different hominins, at different periods, using different routes — some on foot, some on rafts. Tool traditions overlap in unexpected ways: in 2025, a 1.5-million-year-old face from southern Europe, known as DAN5, was found associated with both Oldowan pebbles and early Acheulean handaxes, the two great tool industries once thought to have succeeded one another in a neat chronological sequence. The textbook timeline, in other words, is being rewritten from both ends. What the new evidence does not show is any single "first inventor" of long-distance travel. It suggests instead that wandering out of Africa was a persistent, repeated behaviour — one that our genus was wired for from the very beginning, long before the big brains and complex cultures of Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. If so, the long human career as a traveller began not with a heroic exodus, but with a slow, unending willingness to see what lay over the next hill — and, eventually, over the next sea.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. An unexpectedly early date from central China ii. Stone tools on a drowned Turkish coast iii. Evidence for million-year-old sea crossings iv. A messy, multi-species, multi-route picture v. The discovery of fire at Dmanisi vi. Why Homo sapiens reached Australia first vii. A history of palaeomagnetic dating methods

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What was the traditional view of the first dispersal out of Africa? A. It happened about 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus. B. It happened 65,000 years ago, by Homo sapiens. C. It happened 10,000 years ago, by Neanderthals. D. It never happened.

6. How old are the redated Yunxian fossils? A. About 1 million years. B. About 1.8 million years. C. About 2.1 million years. D. About 65,000 years.

7. Why is the Sulawesi tool discovery important? A. It shows that Homo sapiens built boats 1 million years ago. B. It implies that early hominins made open-sea crossings more than a million years ago. C. It proves that Sulawesi was connected to Asia by a land bridge. D. It dates the extinction of Homo floresiensis.

8. What does the Ayvalık evidence suggest? A. Early humans entered Europe only through the Balkans. B. A now-submerged Aegean corridor may have been used as an entry route. C. The Turkish coast was completely uninhabited in the Palaeolithic. D. Sea levels never changed.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Dmanisi fossils are dated to about 1.8 million years ago.
10. The Yunxian redating is consistent with stone tools in northern China dated 2.43-2.1 million years ago.
11. The Sulawesi tools are older than those previously found on the island by about 10,000 years.
12. The Ayvalık survey found 138 Paleolithic tools across ten sites.
13. The DAN5 fossil was discovered by a team led by Mary Leakey.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The traditional model of a single dispersal by Homo (14) __________ out of Africa 1.8 million years ago is now complicated by much older fossils in China and (15) __________ crossings from more than a million years ago.

答案与解析

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