(单词翻译:单击)
After World War II, the brutality of apes had become an anthropological preoccupation that promised answers to the question:
二战后，猩猩的残暴行为成为人类学关注的焦点，有望为以下问题找到答案：
Does our capacity for depravity divide us from the animal kingdom, or does violence lie at the core of our nature, an upshot of our evolution?
是我们堕落的能力将我们与动物区分开来，还是暴力是我们天性的核心，是我们进化的结果?
Such unease only intensified as the brinkmanship of nuclear powers threatened to tilt into even more catastrophic conflict.
当核大国的边缘政策威胁要陷入更灾难性的冲突时，这种不安只会加剧。
Against this backdrop, a corrosive vision of primate life grew more vivid: Front and center was a portrait of male tyranny, aggression, antagonism.
在这种背景下，对灵长类动物生活的一种侵蚀性的想象变得更加生动:最突出的是一幅男性专制、侵略和对抗的画像。
Fuel for this conviction can be traced back to the 1920s and the notorious carnage at Monkey Hill, a captive-primate colony at the London Zoo.
这一定罪的根源可以追溯到20世纪20年代，以及伦敦动物园圈养灵长类动物聚居地猴山臭名昭著的大屠杀。
The Monkey Hill enclosure had been designed with the latest thinking on animal welfare in mind.
猴山围墙的设计考虑到了动物福利的最新理念。
Rather than consigning apes to stuffy, shadowy cages where lung diseases ran rife, the open-air attraction featured artificial-rock monoliths furnished with heat and light.
与把猩猩关在闷热阴暗的笼子里（这种环境下肺病盛行）不同，这个露天景点以人造岩石为特色，温度适宜，光照充足。
To this impressive diorama, the zoo sought to introduce an equally impressive animal.
在这个令人印象深刻的立体模型中，动物园试图引入一个同样令人印象深刻的动物。
Amid a popular craze for all things Egyptian (King Tut’s tomb had lately been discovered), it settled on the hamadryas baboon, a creature that appears in hieroglyphics and, rendered as a deity, on pharaonic jewelry.
由于最近发现了法老的陵墓，人们对埃及的一切事物都很狂热，他们把目光锁定在了埃及狒狒身上，这是一种出现在象形文字中的生物，被描绘成法老珠宝上的神祇。
With the benefit of hindsight, as de Waal tells it, the exhibit was doomed from the get-go.
德瓦尔说，事后看来，这次展览从一开始就注定要失败。
In their natural habitats in countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia, hamadryas baboons form polygynous groups.
在索马里和埃塞俄比亚等国的自然栖息地，埃及狒狒形成了一夫多妻的群体。
Marauding, virile males snatch juvenile females from their kin before they become reproductively mature and amass “harems.”
掠夺性强、雄壮的狒狒会在雌性狒狒发育成熟并聚集在“后宫”之前从它们的亲族手中抢走它们。
But the zoo wanted only resplendent males, which can weigh nearly twice as much as females and sport a frost-gray ruff around a narrow, pumice-pink face.
但动物园只想要大有看头的雄性狒狒，雄性的体重几乎是雌性的两倍，而且在其狭窄、灰粉色的脸周围有一圈霜灰色的颈毛。
About 100 were ordered.
大约预定了100只雄性狒狒。
When the baboons arrived, the staff found that the batch included a handful of surplus females.
当这些狒狒到达时，动物园的工作人员发现，这批狒狒中还多出了雌性狒狒。
On release, a bloody furor unfolded.
放走雌性狒狒后，一场血腥的愤怒活动爆发了。
The males grievously injured or killed one another; they butchered or maimed more than half the females, and some copulated with corpses.
雄性猩猩互相攻击、互相残杀; 它们屠杀或残害了超过一半的雌性猩猩，有些雄性猩猩还与尸体进行交配。
The event would be retold over the years as an archetypal narrative of male supremacy and barbarity and abject female subservience.
多年来，这一事件作为男性霸权、野蛮和女性屈从的典型叙事被重述。
This, some were quick to pronounce, was what the animal within us looked like: We’re naturally led to dominate and oppress, or to be oppressed.
有些人很快就会发表意见，这就是我们内心的兽性:我们自然而然地被引导去支配和压迫，或者被压迫。
