经济学人下载:讣告:群体遗传学家卡瓦利-斯福扎逝世 享年96岁(2)

For two decades from 1970, when he took up a professorship at Stanford, he devoted himself to this subject.
从1970年起的20年间，卡瓦利-斯福扎担任斯坦福大学的教授，期间一直致力于研究这个课题。

By the 1990s he was able to study variation in DNA itself.
到20世纪90年代，他已经能够研究DNA本身的变异。

When he and his colleagues instructed a computer to sort around 1,000 people from across the globe into five clusters by similarity of DNA,
卡瓦利-斯福扎和其同事利用计算机根据DNA相似性将来自世界各地的1000人分为5组，

the clusters matched the labels by which humans had long grouped themselves intuitively:
而这些分的组和长期以来人类凭直觉对自己的划分是相匹配的：

West Eurasians, East Asians, Native Americans, New Guineans and Africans.
西方欧亚混血、东亚、美洲原住民、新几内亚人和非洲人。

He soon concluded, though, that race was not a scientifically valid way to classify them.
然而，他很快得出结论：种族并不是一个科学有效的分类方法。

Europeans, for example, were about two-thirds Asian and one-third African,
例如，约三分之二的欧洲人是亚洲人，三分之一是非洲人，

but after millennia of mixing there was no such thing as pure Asian or pure African either.
但是经过千年的混合，没有纯粹的亚洲人或纯粹的非洲人。

Skin colour, or the shape of a nose, were just superficial adaptations to climate and place.
肤色，或者鼻子的形状，只是对气候和地形的表面适应。

He represented his genetic data as "trees" branching over time: simplistic diagrams, but beautiful in their simplicity.
卡瓦利-斯福扎将基因数据根据时间以“树状”呈现：简单的图表，但简中有美。

They often agreed, as he had hoped, with the findings of linguists and archaeologists:
正如卡瓦利-斯福扎所希冀的，这些图表正和语言学家和考古学家的发现一致：

suggesting, for example, that humanity arose in Africa, where it stayed for a long time before moving outwards, somewhere between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.
例如，人类起源于非洲，约10万到5万年前，非洲是迁徙之前人类停留时间最长的地方。

The earliest African migrants probably reached Asia first, moving on to Oceania, Europe and America, in that order.
最早的非洲移民可能最先到达亚洲，接下来按序是大洋洲、欧洲和美洲。

He particularly liked to tell his story of farmers.
卡瓦利-斯福扎特别喜欢讲关于农民的发现。

By checking variations between individuals based on their blood groups, he discerned a gradient in that variation that stretched south-east-to-north-west across Europe.
通过检查基于血型的个体差异，他发现了从东南到西北横跨欧洲的变化梯度。

This he saw as the genetic signature of farming after its invention around 9,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent.
卡瓦利-斯福扎认为这是约9000年前在肥沃月湾（一古代农业地区）发明农业之后的基因标志。

As early farmers radiated out of the Near East, he argued, they bred with indigenous hunter-gatherers, until by the time they reached colder climates their genes were a good mix of both.
他认为从近东辐射过来的早期农民，与土著狩猎者结合，直到到了更冷的气候中，农民和狩猎者的基因刚好是完美的融合。