×

Używamy ciasteczek, aby ulepszyć LingQ. Odwiedzając stronę wyrażasz zgodę na nasze polityka Cookie.


image

TED, Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from

Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from

00:11So, this is a story about how we know what we know.

00:16It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff.

00:27(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things."

00:31Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra.

00:40Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole.

00:51(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil.

01:02LN: And at some point, she noticed something.

01:05(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface.

01:11LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before -- prehistoric plant parts. But that night, back at camp ...

01:23(Audio) NR: ... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like ... bone.

01:35LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny.

01:49(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag.

01:53LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was challenging.

01:59(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner.

02:11LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right?

02:13(Laughter)

02:14LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.

02:17(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together.

02:20LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something?

02:29(Laughter)

02:31(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.

02:35LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. But it couldn't have been either of those. It was just too big.

02:50(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal.

02:54LN: So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea.

03:05(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it.

03:17LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.

03:39Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called "collagen fingerprinting." It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match.

04:05So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx.

04:10(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important.

04:14(Laughter)

04:15LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to ... a camel.

04:36(Laughter)

04:38(Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing -- if it's true.

04:42LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton.

05:03(Audience reacts)

05:04Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel.

05:09(Laughter)

05:13Now, when you hear the word "camel," what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature -- hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic?

05:52Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American.

06:03(Music: The Star-Spangled Banner)

06:09(Laughter)

06:10They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more.

06:23(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different?

06:27NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes.

06:34LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles.

06:37(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits.

06:43LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels?

06:46(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize.

06:50LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel.

06:52(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great?

06:54(Laughter)

06:55LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct.

07:14So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north.Like, this is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. You'd have blizzards. You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. Like, how ... How? How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions?

08:05(Laughter)

08:08Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it's kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? What if that hump -- which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat --

08:42(Laughter)

08:43was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. So it helps heat dissipate easier. It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past.

09:26Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes.

09:50So I was trained as a historian. And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes.

10:12(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. Clearly, it always lived there.

10:21LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere.

11:08(Applause)

11:25This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? OK, here, I've got one of these for you here.

11:33(Laughter)

11:35So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall.

11:41(Laughter)

11:43That's not even a joke. Anyway --

11:47But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine.

12:00(Laughter)

12:05Right, Azuri?

12:06And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.

12:15Thank you very much.

12:17(Applause)

Learn languages from TV shows, movies, news, articles and more! Try LingQ for FREE

Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from Latif Nasser|Latif Nasser||||||||| Latif Nasser: No tienes ni idea de dónde vienen realmente los camellos Latifas Nasseras: Jūs net neįsivaizduojate, iš kur iš tikrųjų kilę kupranugariai Латиф Нассер: Вы даже не представляете, откуда на самом деле берутся верблюды Латіф Нассер: Ви навіть не уявляєте, звідки насправді походять верблюди 拉蒂夫·纳赛尔:你不知道骆驼真正来自哪里

00:11So, this is a story about how we know what we know.

00:16It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. |||||||Rybczynski She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff. ||Sie ist Paläobiologin.||||||||||| ||ancient life scientist||||focuses on|||||||

00:27(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me "Dr. Dead Things." 00:27 (Аудио) Наталья Рыбчински: Да, кто-то назвал меня «Доктор Мертвецы».

00:31Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra. ||||||||||||excavates|||||||||||||tundra

00:40Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole. |||||||||||||Fyles Leaf Bed|||||||||||||| Nu, op een zomerdag in 2006, bevond ze zich op een opgravingslocatie genaamd Fyles Leaf Bed, op minder dan 10 graden noorderbreedte verwijderd van de magnetische noordpool.

00:51(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil. |Narrator|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||fossilized remains

01:02LN: And at some point, she noticed something.

01:05(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. ||Rust-colored|||rust-colored|||||||||| It was just lying on the surface. |||resting|||

01:11LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before -- prehistoric plant parts. ||||||||||small piece|||||||||||||||||||| But that night, back at camp ...

01:23(Audio) NR: ... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like ... bone. |||conservation|||||||

01:35LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny. |||||||||||||||||pieces||||||||||

01:49(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. 01:49 (Аудио) НР: Не так уж и много. It fits in a small Ziploc bag. |||||plastic storage bag| Hij past in een kleine Ziploc-tas.

01:53LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. ||||||||||puzzle| 01: 53LN: Et elle a essayé de les reconstituer comme un puzzle. 01: 53LN: En ze probeerde ze in elkaar te zetten als een legpuzzel. But it was challenging.

01:59(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. |||||||||||||||||filler material||||| So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner.

02:11LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right?

02:13(Laughter)

02:14LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.

02:17(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together.

02:20LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? 02:20ЛН: Насколько вы были уверены, что у вас все получилось правильно, что вы все правильно собрали? Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something? ||||||||||||||||Sittich|| ||||||||||||||||bird||

02:29(Laughter)

02:31(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.

02:35LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. ||||||||leg bone||||||||was from|||split-hoofed|split-hoofed||||||||| 02: 35LN: Ce qu'elle avait, elle a découvert, c'était un tibia, un os de jambe, et plus précisément, un qui appartenait à un mammifère aux sabots, donc quelque chose comme une vache ou un mouton. But it couldn't have been either of those. It was just too big.

02:50(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal.

02:54LN: So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea. Ударившись о стену, она показала один из фрагментов своим коллегам в Колорадо, и у них возникла идея.

03:05(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it. ||||||||cut||||||||||||||||

03:17LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. ||||||versengtes| ||||||burnt| 03: 17LN: Ça sentait un peu la chair roussie. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. ||||||||||||||gross anatomy|| Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. Collagen||||||| And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.

03:39Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called "collagen fingerprinting." ||||||||||||Bristol|||observed||||||||Mike Buckley||demonstrating||||||||identification technique 03: 39Puis un an ou deux plus tard, Natalia était à une conférence à Bristol, et elle a vu qu'un de ses collègues, Mike Buckley, faisait la démonstration de ce nouveau processus qu'il appelait «l'empreinte digitale du collagène». It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match.

04:05So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx.

04:10(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important.

04:14(Laughter)

04:15LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to ... a camel.

04:36(Laughter)

04:38(Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing -- if it's true.

04:42LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton.

05:03(Audience reacts)

05:04Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel.

05:09(Laughter)

05:13Now, when you hear the word "camel," what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. |||||||||||||||||Bactrian camel|||||| But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature -- hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. ||||||||||||||||Dromedar||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||image||||||||||||one-humped camel|typical|||||||||||||||Sahara Desert||||||||||||||||journeys||||||||walk||| Mais il y a de fortes chances que l'image de carte postale que vous avez dans votre cerveau en soit une, le dromadaire, la créature du désert par excellence - traîne dans des endroits sablonneux et chauds comme le Moyen-Orient et le Sahara, a une grosse bosse sur le dos pour stocker l'eau pour ces longues randonnées dans le désert, il a de grands pieds larges pour l'aider à franchir les dunes de sable. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic? Так как же один из этих парней оказался в высоких широтах Арктики?

05:52Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American. ||||||||||||Natalia's|||||||

06:03(Music: The Star-Spangled Banner) |||Star-Spangled|

06:09(Laughter)

06:10They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more.

06:23(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different? 06:23 (Аудио) ЛН: Если я поставлю их всех в ряд, они будут выглядеть по-другому?

06:27NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes.

06:34LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles. |||noses||crocodilian reptiles 06:34ЛН: У некоторых были морды, как у крокодилов.

06:37(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits.

06:43LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels?

06:46(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize.

06:50LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel.

06:52(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great?

06:54(Laughter)

06:55LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. ||||||||||||||||||||||||domesticated animals||||||||||||| And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct.

07:14So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north.Like, this is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. 07:14 Итак, ученые уже все это знали, но это все еще не полностью объясняет, как Наталья нашла его так далеко на севере. Например, по температуре это полная противоположность Сахаре. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. Справедливости ради, три с половиной миллиона лет назад было в среднем на 22 градуса по Цельсию теплее, чем сейчас. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. |||||northern forest||||||Yukon Territory||| But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. ||||||||||||bodies of water||| Но все равно у них будут полугодовые зимы, когда пруды замерзнут. You'd have blizzards. ||snowstorms You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. Like, how ... How? How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions? ||||||||celebrities|||||||

08:05(Laughter)

08:08Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it's kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? Что, если те самые особенности, которые, как мы представляем, делают верблюда столь подходящим для жизни в таких местах, как Сахара, на самом деле эволюционировали, чтобы помочь ему пережить зиму? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? |||||||||||||||||||snowshoeing equipment What if that hump -- which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat -- ||||||||||||liquid|||

08:42(Laughter)

08:43was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? ||||||||||||||||limited in supply And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? ||||||||||||||nachrüsten|||||||| ||||||||||||||adapt to|the||||||| Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. ||||||||||||regions|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| So it helps heat dissipate easier. ||||spread out| Так легче рассеивать тепло. It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past. |||||||||||camel|||||||||||| Это безумная идея, что то, что кажется доказательством типичной пустынной природы верблюда, на самом деле может быть доказательством его высокого арктического прошлого.

09:26Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. |||||||||||||||window|||||| But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes.

09:50So I was trained as a historian. And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. Они имеют смысл в прошлом. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes.

10:12(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. Он полностью приспособлен для этого. Clearly, it always lived there. Очевидно, он всегда там жил.

10:21LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. 10:21ЛН: Но в любой момент вы можете найти какую-нибудь крошечную улику. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. ||||||||||rethink||||| Вы можете узнать какую-то крошечную вещь, которая заставит вас переосмыслить все, что, как вы думали, вы знали. Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. ||||||||||piece||||||||||||||||||unexpected|||||||Seuss-like||||||| And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. |||||umgekrempelt||||||| |||||changed||||||| It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere. ||||||specialized|||||||||||||world traveler|||||||||||||| Он превратился из смехотворно нишевого существа, подходящего только для этой конкретной среды, в путешественника по миру, который случайно оказался в Сахаре и может оказаться практически где угодно.

11:08(Applause)

11:25This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? name||||| OK, here, I've got one of these for you here. ||||||this|||

11:33(Laughter)

11:35So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall.

11:41(Laughter)

11:43That's not even a joke. 11:43 Это даже не шутка. Anyway --

11:47But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine. |||||adapt||

12:00(Laughter)

12:05Right, Azuri?

12:06And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.

12:15Thank you very much.

12:17(Applause)