(单词翻译:单击)
One morning in January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space.
1961年1月的一个早晨，在吃完婴儿麦片、炼乳和半个鸡蛋的早餐后，一只来自喀麦隆的雄性黑猩猩(饲养员称其为哈姆)被绑在一个压力控制太空舱里，搭载着美国国家航空航天局的火箭，被送入了太空。
No human had yet been where he was headed.
还没有人类去过他要前往的地方。
At the time of Ham’s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of astronautic flight.
在哈姆初次登上恒星的时候，医生们仍然担心其关键的身体机能(包括吞咽和心脏活动)可能无法经受住太空飞行中的失重。
When Ham returned to Earth’s surface with only a bruised nose to show for the adventure, he entered history as the first hominoid to endure outer space.
当哈姆返回地球表面时，只有鼻子在这次冒险中擦伤了，他作为第一个经受住外太空环境的类人猿进入了历史。
Chimpanzees—along with their cousins the bonobos—are our closest living relatives.
黑猩猩--以及它们的近亲--倭黑猩猩--是我们现存的近亲。
Little wonder we are prone to view them as human prototypes.
难怪我们倾向于将它们视为人类的原型。
At least 96 percent of our DNA is shared, and we have many anatomical traits in common, including some of the same blood groups and skeletal features such as delicate sinuses.
我们至少有96%的DNA是相同的，我们有许多共同的解剖特征，包括一些相同的血型和骨骼特征，如精致的鼻窦。
Using a chimpanzee to aid in “human rating” a NASA space vehicle for astronauts was a test of our mutual fragility.
使用黑猩猩来援助“人类评估”NASA为宇航员设计的太空飞船是对我们共同的脆弱性的考验。
It was also a symbolic gesture, marking space travel as the culmination of our evolutionary trajectory into social beings and tool-users sophisticated enough to leave Earth.
这也是一个象征性的姿态，标志着太空旅行的高潮--我们进化成社会生物和工具使用者的轨迹复杂到足以离开地球。
One way to understand the moment when Ham was flung into that inhuman realm where the universe skims the planet would be to say that we were, as a species, looking to our ancestral past to forge the frontiers of our future.
那刻，哈姆被扔进那个非人类领域--天地万物掠过地球，要理解那个时刻的方法是说，作为一个物种，我们正在追寻我们祖先的过往，以打造我们未来前沿。
The story of our evolutionary congruence with primates is perhaps our most powerful collective origin myth.
我们与灵长类动物进化一致的故事可能是我们最有力的集体起源神话。
It has a lineage that is scientific:
这有一个科学的谱系:
The prehistoric ancestry of Homo sapiens shares a bough of the tree of life with several primates, including gorillas and orangutans, but most recently forked from that of the chimpanzees and bonobos, about 6 million to 8 million years ago.
智人的史前祖先与包括大猩猩和猩猩在内的几种灵长类动物共享生命之树的一根枝干，但最近的谱系分支来自600万至800万年前的黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩。
But that lineage isn’t purely a matter of science.
但这种谱系并不是纯粹的科学问题。
The conjoined heritage of apes and humans has been put to political use, invoked by those seeking to explain aspects of human society as an intractable function of our inner ape.
类人猿和人类的共同遗产已被用于政治用途，那些试图将人类社会的某些方面解释为猿人内心难以驾驭的功能的人援引了这一点。
Others have been motivated by that very debate to assert fundamental differences between people and our primate kin.
另一些人正是受到这场辩论的激励，断言人类和灵长类近亲之间存在根本差异。
