20230314英语学习

篇目1

Oldest Evidence of Right-Handedness Seen in Fossil Jaw
颌骨化石证明，人类祖先是“右撇子”

Fossils from the “handy man” of the human family tree have now provided the oldest known evidence of right-handedness in our lineage.

The discovery comes from a 1.8-million-year-old upper jawbone of Homo habilis, a human ancestor who lived in eastern and southern Africa from 2.4 to 1.4 million years ago.Scientists suspect the species was a regular user of stone tools, which are found in abundance around the fossil discovery site.

The jawbone’s teeth, still firmly in place, are covered in diagonal scratches that were most likely made when this Homo habilis individual, perhaps a female, accidentally nicked her teeth with a stone tool held in her right hand.

While the Homo habilis jawbone is a sample size of one, its very existence says that scientists could use the species’ teeth to learn more about ancient humans’ brain organization.

Today, about 90 percent of humans are right-handed, a skewed ratio that’s associated with how much the two hemispheres of our brain divide up processing different tasks.Intriguingly, the human brain’s left hemisphere not only controls the body’s right side, but it also contains the centers that control language.

“There’s an association between right-handedness, cerebral lateral asymmetry, and language — all fit together in a package,” says anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas.Frayer led the study of the Homo habilis jawbone, published online last week in the Journal of Human Evolution.

This relationship seems to hold across primates: Neanderthal remains, for instance, show that they were also overwhelmingly right-handed, while chimpanzees are about three-fifths right-handed, by some estimates.Bonobos show no preference for either hand.

The Homo habilis fossil is from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, one of the richest fossil sites containing ancient hominin remains.The specimen is more than 1.3 million years older than the next oldest evidence for handedness in humans, a set of Homo heidelbergensis jawbones and teeth first described in 2009.

Counterintuitively, scientists often have to rely on ancient teeth to determine what ancient hominins were doing with their hands.

Experiments with modern humans wearing mouth guards suggest that if a person holds an object taut between her mouth and nondominant hand — a large hunk of food, perhaps, or maybe a hide — and then cuts it with a stone tool in her dominant hand, the tool occasionally nicks the person’s teeth.

If a person is right-handed, those grooves run from the upper left to the lower right of the tooth surface.

Sure enough, when Frayer and his colleagues examined the Homo habilis jawbone, the teeth exhibited these diagonal grooves, suggesting that 1.8 million years ago, someone in what’s now Tanzania may well have been a right-hand woman — or a right-hand man.

“Teeth are incredible because they preserve their chemistry, growth, and development,” says Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, an anthropologist at the Ohio State University who wasn’t involved with the study.“You can extract a lot from them — no pun intended.”

Frayer and Guatelli-Steinberg both point out, however, that one set of teeth cannot tell the whole story.

“For this to really speak to the human trait — a predilection of right-handedness — we
need to get some idea of the proportion of individuals who were using their right hands,” says Guatelli-Steinberg.

Frayer says that he hopes the new study will help to solve that problem by inspiring other researchers to examine additional Homo habilis teeth for the telltale grooves.

篇目2

What Is Narrative Therapy? Definition and Techniques
叙事疗法：讲述故事，自我治愈

Narrative therapy is a psychological approach that seeks to adjust the stories one tells about one’s life in order to bring about positive change and better mental health.It considers people the experts on their own lives and views them as separate from their problems.

Narrative therapy is a relatively new, and therefore lesser known, form of therapy.It was developed in the 1980s by Michael White, an Australian social worker, and David Epston, a family therapist from New Zealand.It gained traction in the United States in the 1990s.

• Narrative Therapy Techniques

The goal of the narrative therapist is to work with the individual to come up with an alternative story that better matches what they actually want from their lives.There are several techniques that are often used by narrative therapists to do this.They are:

• Constructing a Narrative

The therapist and the client work together to tell the client’s story in the client’s own words.In the process, the therapist and the client look for new meanings in the story that may help them alter the client’s existing stories or create new ones.

This process is sometimes referred to as “re-authoring” or "re-storying."This is based on the idea that one event can have many different meanings and interpretations.In narrative therapy the client will come to recognize that they can make new meanings from their life stories.

• Externalization

The goal of this technique is to change a client’s perspective so they no longer see themselves as problematic.Instead, they see themselves as a person with problems.This externalizes their problems, reducing the influence they have on the individual’s life.

The idea behind this technique is that if we see our problems as an integral part of our personality, they can seem impossible to change.But if those problems are simply something the individual does, they feel far less insurmountable.It’s often challenging for clients to embrace this perspective.

However, doing so can be empowering and make people feel like they have more control over their issues.

• Deconstruction

Deconstructing a problem means making it more specific in order to zero in on the core of the issue.When a story has been dominant in our lives for an extended period of time, we may begin to overgeneralize it, and therefore, have difficulty seeing what the underlying problem really is.A narrative therapist helps clients reduce the story to its parts in order to discover what the problem they’re struggling with really is.

For example, a client may say he feels frustrated because his colleagues at work don’t value his work.This is a very general statement and it’s hard to develop a solution to this problem.

So the therapist would work with the client to deconstruct the problem to get an idea of why he’s constructing a narrative in which he’s being devalued by his colleagues.This can help the client see himself as someone who has a fear of being overlooked and needs to learn to better communicate his competencies to his colleagues.

• Unique Outcomes

This technique involves looking at one’s story from a new perspective and developing more positive, life-affirming stories as a result.Since there are many stories we could potentially tell about our experiences, the idea of this technique is to reimagine our story.That way, the new story can minimize the problem that became overwhelming in the old story.

• Critiques

Narrative therapy has been shown to help individuals, couples, and families with problems including anxiety, depression, aggression and anger, grief and loss, and family and relationship conflict.However, there are several criticisms that have been leveled at narrative therapy.

First, because it’s been around for such a brief period of time in comparison to other forms of therapy, there isn’t a great deal of scientific evidence for the efficacy of narrative therapy.

In addition, some clients may not be reliable or truthful in their narration of their stories.If the client is only comfortable putting his stories in a positive light with the therapist, he won’t get much out of this form of therapy.