(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Jason Goldman.
Foxes hunt small animals. And when other predators, including us, kill large animals, foxes are known to scavenge on the leftovers. Now a study of their scavenging shows that foxes have slyly relied on people for food for tens of thousands of years.
"I saw that foxes benefit a lot today from humans. And I was wondering if this was also the case in the past."
Chris Baumann from the University of Tübingen's Institute for Scientific Archaeology.
Humans may have had a hand in driving the extinction of large herbivores like mammoths and mastodons in the Late Pleistocene, which ended around 12,000 years ago. But we inadvertently helped other species—and Baumann suspected that Pleistocene-era foxes may have been among them.
So Baumann and his team obtained the remains of 70 foxes found in southwestern Germany. They ranged from around 42,000 years ago, when Neandertals lived in the area, to some 30,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens came to dominate the region.
"In the study, we analyzed the bone collagen of the foxes and saw that there are indeed these different strategies of feeding."
The carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the fox bones supplied clues to what the foxes had eaten. And at the earlier Neandertal-era sites, a few of the foxes hunted rodents, but most had a diet indistinguishable from the larger carnivores—meaning that they regularly scavenged from the kills made by wolves and bears.
But by the late Pleistocene, when we showed up, the foxes had switched to a diet of mainly reindeer and horse meat—that is, human table scraps. The finding is in the journal PLOS ONE.
"And so this one niche that we figured out, that comes when Homo sapiens entered this area, is more or less stable. So the foxes have time to feed on this resource over the last years of their life. And that's very cool, because now we know that humans must have made some changes in the environment to provide this niche."
Neandertals surely hunted animals, too. But there weren't enough of them, or they didn't stay in one place long enough, for the foxes to adapt to scavenging off their dinner plates. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, did stick around long enough to affect the foxes' foraging strategy.
Baumann says that studying the remains of opportunistic scavengers like foxes—that learn to take advantage of human societies—can offer useful information about human impacts on ecosystems over time.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.
参考译文
这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是杰森·古德曼。
狐狸猎食小动物。当包括我们在内的其他捕食者捕杀大型动物时，人人皆知狐狸会以残羹剩饭为食。现在，一项关于狐狸捡食的研究表明，数万年来，狐狸一直偷偷地依赖人类获得食物。
“我看到狐狸如今从人类身上获得了很多益处。我想知道过去是否也是如此。”
图宾根大学科学考古学研究所的克里斯·鲍曼说到。
猛犸象和乳齿象等大型食草动物在更新世晚期灭绝，人类可能是推手之一，更新世约在1.2万年前结束。但我们无意中帮助了其他物种，鲍曼怀疑更新世时期的狐狸可能位列其中。
于是鲍曼及其团队获得了在德国西南部发现的70只狐狸的遗骸。这些狐狸生活的时间，从尼安德特人在这里居住的约4.2万年前到智人统治这个地区的约3万年前。
“在研究中，我们分析了狐狸的骨胶原，发现确实存在这些不同的进食策略。”
狐狸骨头中的碳和氮同位素提供了线索，我们由此可以得知狐狸吃过什么。在较早的尼安德特人时代遗址，少数狐狸捕猎啮齿动物，但大多数狐狸的饮食与大型食肉动物没有区别，这意味着它们经常从狼和熊的猎物中捡食。
但到了更新世晚期，当我们人类出现时，狐狸的饮食已转为以驯鹿和马肉为主，也就是人类餐桌的残余食物。这一发现发表在《公共科学图书馆·综合》期刊上。
“我们发现，智人进入这个地区时出现的这种生态位或多或少是稳定的。因此，狐狸在生命的最后几年有时间以这种资源为食。这很酷，因为现在我们知道要提供这个生态位，人类肯定对环境做出了一定改变。”
尼安德特人当然也捕猎动物。但是他们的人数不够多，或者他们在一个地方待的旱不够长，不足以狐狸适应从他们的餐盘中捡食。另一方面，智人在这里逗留的时间确实够长，足以影响狐狸的觅食策略。
鲍曼表示，研究像狐狸这样的机会主义食腐动物——即学习如何占人类社会便宜——的遗骸，可以提供有用的信息，说明人类随时间的推移对生态系统的影响。
谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是杰森·古德曼。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
重点讲解：
1. benefit from 获益；对…有益；有利于；
Both sides have benefited from the talks.
双方都从谈判中获益。
2. have a hand in 参加；参与；
Several of his colleagues had a hand in his downfall.
他的几位同事对他的下台起了作用。
3. be indistinguishable from 难以区别的；难以分辨的；
The male of the species is almost indistinguishable from the female.
这个物种的雄性和雌性几乎无法分辨。
4. take advantage of 占…的便宜；欺骗；捉弄；
She took advantage of him even after they were divorced.
甚至在他们离婚后，她还在占他的便宜。
关注微信公众号【可可双语精读】，获取详细讲解内容
