Science and technology

　　科学及技术

　　Human communication

　　人类交流

　　Gesture politics

　　形体政治学

　　People talk a lot, but their hand signals may conveymore useful information

　　虽然人类主要通过语言交流，但是一些手势往往能传达更多有用的信息。

　　Silence is golden

　　沉默是金

　　IT IS received wisdom that humanity owes a lot of its evolutionary success to its remarkableability to communicate.

　　人类在进化上的成功大部分归功于其非凡的交流能力已经成为一个被接受的常识。

　　So much so, in fact, that few have bothered to test this hypothesis in any systematic way.

　　尽管如此，事实上还没有人系统地验证过这一假设。

　　Now, a group of researchers led by Andrew King, of the Royal Veterinary College in Britain, has tried to plug this gaping hole.

　　如今，一个由“英国皇家兽医学院”的安德鲁.科恩率领的研究小组正尝试填补这块空缺。

　　Their first results have just been published in Biology Letters.

　　他们的第一个研究成果被发表在了《生物学快报》上。

　　Hunter-gatherers’ practice of scouring their surroundings for edible plants is responsible for half of the name anthropologists have bestowed on them.

　　采猎者搜集居住区周围可食用植物的行为应了人类学家赋予他们的名字中的一半的内容。

　　And for good reason.

　　而出于此理由，

　　With hunting likely to have been an intermittent diversion, effective foraging would have beencrucial to tiding early humans over to the next woolly mammoth.

　　狩猎可能变成了一种间歇性的活动，而有效的搜集活动对于帮助早期人类渡过冰河时期起到了关键作用。

　　So Dr King and his colleagues conducted a study to see how, if at all, communication enhances foraging prowess.

　　所以，科恩博士及其同事主持了这项研究活动以确认交流是如何促进搜集技巧的。

　　They recruited 121 visitors to, rather appropriately, the London Zoo, and split them into 43 groups.

　　他们邀请了大约121名游客访问伦敦动物园，并将他们分成了43个小组。

　　Each group contained between two and seven people.

　　每个小组的成员在2到7人之间，

　　Some were single-sex and some mixed.

　　且有的为单一性别，有的为男女混合搭配。

　　Some were composed of family and friends whereas others brought together complete strangers.

　　部分小组由亲戚朋友组成，其他则完全是陌生人。

　　Half the groups were allowed to communicate freely.

　　在这些小组中，一半可以进行自由交流，

　　The rest were told to exchange no verbal signals or gestures of any kind.

　　另一半择不允许通过声音信号以及任何肢体动作进行交流。

　　Each group was then asked to a room containing six foraging patches—boxes filled with 300 cards, some green and some white—arranged at a distance from a central home base.

　　每个小组会被邀请到一个设置了6个搜集区---也就是盛有300张绿色和白色卡片的盒子的房间，这些盒子被放置在离中心基地区域一定距离的地方。

　　The green cards were defined as good and the patches varied from 5% to 95% green.

　　绿色的卡片为最好，每个搜集区所含绿色卡片的比例由5%到95%不等。

　　The foragers could not see inside the boxes and were allowed to pick only one card at a time, through a hand hole, using their dominant hand.

　　搜集者看不到盒子的内部情况并且只能惯用手从小孔处一次取出一枚卡片。