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Harding is a small and chirpy Australian, from Brisbane originally,
哈丁个子不高，性情开朗，出生于澳大利亚布里斯班。
with the rare knack for being amused and earnest at the same time.
她既办事认真，又不乏幽默，这是不大多见的。
"Don't know," she said at once, grinning, when I asked her how people in Oxfordshire harbored sequences of betaglobin that shouldn't be there.
我问她牛津郡的人为什么会出现这种本不该具有的球蛋白基因。“我不知道，”她不假思索地微笑着回答说，
"On the whole," she went on more somberly, "the genetic record supports the out-of-Africa hypothesis.
“基因记录总的来说支持‘走出非洲’的假说。”她带着比较严肃的神色接着说，
But then you find these anomalous clusters, which most geneticists prefer not to talk about.
“但是你接着发现了这些特例，对此大多数遗传学家不愿意提及。
There's huge amounts of information that would be available to us if only we could understand it, but we don't yet.
即使我们能弄明白这一切，我们还需要收集大量的信息，但是我们还没有做到，
We've barely begun.
我们才刚剐开始。
" She refused to be drawn out on what the existence of Asian-origin genes in Oxfordshire tells us other than that the situation is clearly complicated. "
她只是说，情况显然很复杂，不愿意就亚洲古人类的基因出现在牛津郡发表意见。
All we can say at this stage is that it is very untidy and we don't really know why."
现阶段我们只能说，这非常不符合常规，但是我们确实不知道为什么会这样。
At the time of our meeting, in early 2002, another Oxford scientist named Bryan Sykes had just produced a popular book called The Seven Daughters of Eve in which,
我们会见的时间是在2002年初，牛津大学另一位名为布莱恩.塞克斯的科学家不久前刚刚出版了一本非常受欢迎的书《夏娃的七个女儿》。
using studies of mitochondrial DNA, he had claimed to be able to trace nearly all living Europeans back to a founding population of just seven women
他在书中借用了线粒体DNA的研究成果，宣称他可以将几乎所有在世的欧洲人的祖先追溯到七个女人
the daughters of Eve of the title—who lived between 10,000 and 45,000 years ago in the time known to science as the Paleolithic.
也就是夏娃的七个女儿。她们生活在4.5万年前到1万年前，也就是科学上所说的旧石器时代。
To each of these women Sykes had given a name—Ursula, Xenia, Jasmine, and so on
塞克斯给这七个女人都取了名字——乌尔苏拉、齐尼亚、杰斯敏等等，
and even a detailed personal history. ("Ursula was her mother's second child. The first had been taken by a leopard when he was only two... "）
并且拟就了一个详细的个人家史。（“乌尔苏拉是她母亲的第二个孩子，第一个孩子在两岁时被一只豹子叼走了……”）
When I asked Harding about the book, she smiled broadly but carefully,
当我同哈丁说起这本书时，她先是爽朗而又不失分寸地笑了笑，
as if not quite certain where to go with her answer.
似乎对该怎样回答这个问题有些拿不定主意。
"Well, I suppose you must give him some credit for helping to popularize a difficult subject," she said and paused thoughtfully.
“这个……对于他将深奥的学科普及化所作的努力，我认为你应该给他一些表扬。”她说，若有所思地停顿下来，
