发现：穴居人的第一场盛宴遗迹？

以色列希拉松塔奇提特洞穴的发掘工作展示给世人一个12，000年前即存在的墓葬点，这其中的发现表明这里曾有一场正式的大规模宴会。
Hebrew University / PA
Jewish families around the world will gather at sundown next Wednesday to share foods both appalling (gefilte fish) and sublime (my Aunt Rita's pot roast) as they celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Muslims will gather at the same moment for the last iftar, marking the end of the penultimate day of Ramadan. Next week will also bear witness to an untold number of birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and funerals, along with innumerable other communal gatherings, every one of them centered on a major meal.世界各地的犹太家庭将在下周三日落时分聚集起来并分享传统食物——既有味道骇人的（比如鱼丸）也有无比美味的（比如我的丽塔阿姨做的炖肉）——作为他们庆祝Rosh Hashanah，即犹太新年的一种方式。穆斯林们在同样的时刻聚集起来，则是为了开斋节，庆祝斋月倒数第二天的结束。下周也将见证无数的生日，婚礼，周年纪念和葬礼，以及数不清的其他公共集会，每场集会的中心都会是一场正餐宴会。
It makes you wonder — especially if your family feasts tend to end in fistfights and broken dishware — how this nearly universal means of marking important events got started. It's not quite in the same league as the most crucial milestones of human evolution, such as walking upright, making tools or developing language. But it's at the very least a medium-size mystery: Who were the first feasters? And why?
这些让你好奇——特别是如果你的家庭节日宴会往往以拳脚相加和破碎的餐具结束时——这几乎是普遍存在的庆祝重要节日的方式是怎么起源的。这不是什么“人类进化里程碑”般的事件，像是直立行走啦，制造工具啦，发展出语言体系啦。但是这至少是一个“中等规模”的谜团：谁是最初的“宴会者”？为啥要组织起宴会来？
Natalie Munro may have the answer. In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the University of Connecticut anthropologist reports on excavations at Hilazon Tachtit, a cave in Israel that served as a burial site for a Neolithic people called the Natufians about 12,000 years ago. Along with human remains, she and her co-authors found evidence of butchered tortoises and cattle — in far greater numbers than you'd expect from casual snacking or even a good meal.
Natalie Munro 可能掌握着问题的答案。在《美国国家科学院刊》杂志上，康涅狄格大学的考古学家团队报道了在以色列希拉松塔奇提特洞穴，这里曾作为12，000年前新石器时代人类的一个墓葬点，并曾被称作Natufians 。伴随着人类遗骸，她和她的合作者们发现屠宰龟和家养牛的痕迹——其数量远远比休闲零食或甚至一顿美餐需要的多。
 
That alone doesn't prove that the Natufians were first. Indeed, says Munro, "there's no question that people ate communally long before this. If hunters killed a large animal, for example, they would have shared it to keep it from going to waste."
仅仅这些不能证明Natufians是第一次宴会。的确，Munro也说：“毫无疑问人们远在这之前就开始了公共宴会的行为。比如，如果猎手们杀死了一只大型动物，人们将会分享猎物以免浪费。”
 
The Hilazon Tachtit site was different, however: the cattle remains alone, from a wild species known as aurochs, suggest enough food for 35 people or so. Moreover, aurochs remains are relatively rare in Natufian excavations; the bones here probably came from three animals, suggesting special effort to lug them to the cave. And because some of the leftovers were deliberately placed into graves along with the departed, it's clear that the eating and the burials were intimately related. "It was more formalized and larger in scale" than more ancient communal meals, says Munro.
希拉松塔奇提特是不同的，虽然家养牛与野生牛相比，依然能为大约35个人提供足够的食物。此外，Natudian发掘现场野牛的遗骸相对稀少；这里出土的骨殖可能来源于三种动物，提示有外力将它们拖动到洞穴中。又由于一些残羹被有意的与故去者一起放置在墓穴中，很明显宴会与葬礼是紧密相关的。相对与其他远古时代的公共聚餐，“它更加正式，规模也更大”，Munro说。
 
The historical era in which the funeral banquet took place is a further clue. The feast dates back to about the same moment in human development when we stopped wandering around as hunter-gatherers. "Humans were settling down, intensively using grasses and legumes and ultimately starting to cultivate them," Munro explains. It was, in short, the beginning of both agriculture and civilization — and a new kind of social order was required. With people now living together in large numbers, they had to find ways to limit friction. "Before," says Munro, "you could just move away. Now you needed a mechanism for community integration, figuring out ways to get along."
葬礼宴会发生的历史时期是一个更进一步的线索。宴会的出现可以追朔到人类中止狩猎采集方式获得食物的时期。“人们安顿下来，深入利用牧草和豆科植物并最终开始培育它们，”Munro解释道。简单来说，这是农业和文明的开端——并因此人类社会需要一种新的社会秩序。随着人们开始大量的聚居在一起，他们需要减少人与人之间摩擦冲突的方法。“在那之前”Munro说，“你只需离开即可。但现在你需要一种将社区整合在一起，使人们和平共处的方式。”
Communal feasts would have been a way to do that: they would have signaled the importance of major events and created a shared experience. But they would also have required a set of rules — some sort of Stone Age etiquette — to keep them moving along smoothly.
公共宴会是一种可行的方法：既可以纪念重大事件又可以制造一种分享的氛围。但是一套保证宴会顺利进行的规矩——某种石器时代的餐桌礼仪—— 还是必要的。
 
The evidence is admittedly still circumstantial; Munro hasn't shown definitively that feasting hadn't been going on for tens of thousands of years by the time the Natufians had their funeral party. But given the timing, it's at least a reasonable conclusion that some of next week's ritual meals — including, quite plausibly, the ancestor of the pot roast — had their start 120 centuries or so ago in what would someday be the modern Middle East.
然而，目前出土的证据仍然是部分被接受的；Munro无法确证在Natufians的葬礼宴会之前宴会习俗是否已经持续了数万年。但是鉴于Natufians宴会出现的时代，人们得出的如下结论也是合情合理的：下周的一些仪式餐饮——包括听上去像那么回事的炖肉的先祖——出现在大约120个世纪那个现在被叫做中东的地方。