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  3. Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum’s

Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum’s

admin2011-01-02  31
问题    Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum’s Prehistoric Department to focus his magnifying glass on a mystery. "Somewhat outside my usual beat," he said.
   This was not a question of Who Did It, but Who Was It. The blunt instruments he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by a radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them.
   The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum’s five-year-long excavation at Grime’s Graves, near Thetford, Norfolk, a 93-acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3,000 to 1,500 B. C.
   Flint was especially used for axe beads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders.
   What excited Mr. G. de G. Sieveking, the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the fried mud still sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify individuals who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than has been supposed in the past."
   Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who four years ago had "assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human grip in the mud. Then on one he found the full imprint of the "ridge structure" of a human hand — that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear in wielding a pick.
   Chief Superintendent Lambourne has agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light. But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings.
   "Fingerprints and handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell us nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them," he says. "Even the fingerprints of a gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team."
   "As an indication of intelligence I might determine which way up the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them."
   To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues any such findings will be added to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors.
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答案A
解析 细节题。第五段最后一句说此研究的价值就是帮助我们了解那些虽然不能读、写，但是智力水平超过我们以前所想的老祖先的情况。选项A通过句子简化的方式给出了该句的同义改写，意为“从中可以得到有关这一时期的有用的信息”，useful facts(有用的信息)可以认为是原文所述内容的同义词组，故正确。要特别注意干扰项D，意为“它们是关于这些聪明但是没有文化的人的珍贵资料”，将原文中的“智力水平”intelligence替换成了“聪明的” intelligent，故排除。
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