What the species like the mammoth is, it is a lesson from history. Perhaps the most relevant lesson that history could teach us would be how the great shifts in climate have affected the people of the past. One museum project is trying to work out exactly that. Chris Van Tulleken met museum palaeontologist Professor Chris Stringer at Haisborough on the coast of Norfolk. Is it still fun for you to get your hands dirty? Is it still exciting for you to come to do this? Oh yeah, it's fantastic to dig, and of course there's always the expectation that you're going to find something exciting. I mean, to uncover a stone tool and you're actually holding that, and the last time. You know, someone held that was a human who lived about 700,000 years ago, that is just so exciting. This dig is revealing the secrets of how climate affected the lives of the earliest inhabitants of Britain. We're actually getting much more out of the sediments. We're getting beetle remains. We're getting evidence of wood and pollen. So all that environmental information is really important to flesh out the story of what it was like when humans were living here.


猛犸象等物种的灭绝是历史给我们的教训 可能历史教给我们最有用的一堂课就是气候的大幅变化是怎样影响过去人类的生活的。馆中的一项项目就在研究这一课题 克里斯·凡·特勒肯在诺福克岸边的海氏沙洲找到了博物馆古生物学家斯特林格教授。 你还是喜欢干这脏活吗？干这活你还是很兴奋吧？ 对，挖掘工作很有趣。当然，每次你都有盼头。想发现某些激动人心的东西，要能发现件石器，你就能拿着它。而上一个拿着它的可是七十万年前的人，这就很令人激动。 这次挖掘旨在探秘，气候变化对英国史前生物有何影响我们在沉积物中可以得到很多信息. 可以找到甲虫的遗骸，可以找到木头和花粉的痕迹，这一类的环境信息对重现早期人类的生活环境至关重要。