新的证据表明，这些人类祖先在11.7万年前神秘死亡

In the early 1930s, Dutch anthropologists found a giant bed of bones hidden above the banks of the Solo river on the Indonesian island of Java.

20世纪30年代初，荷兰人类学家在印度尼西亚爪哇岛的梭罗河岸上发现了一个巨大的骨床。

More than 25,000 fossil specimens were buried in the river mud in an area called Ngandong, including 12 skull caps and two leg bones from a particularly intriguing human ancestor: Homo erectus.

在一个叫nganton的地方，超过25000个化石标本被埋在河泥中，其中包括12个头盖骨和两块来自一个特别有趣的人类祖先——直立人的腿骨。

This species of early human persisted for nearly 2 million years and spread far across parts of Africa and Asia. But scientists had been unable to identify when the last of them died out.

这种早期人类持续了近200万年，并在非洲和亚洲的部分地区传播开来。但科学家们一直无法确定它们最后灭绝的时间。

Efforts to determine the exact age of the Java fossils didn't help much, since that gave a broad range of options: Their time of death was estimated to be somewhere between 550,000 and 27,000 years ago.

确定爪哇化石的确切年龄的努力没有多大帮助，因为这提供了广泛的选择:他们的死亡时间估计在55万至2.7万年前。

But a study published today in the journal Nature has put questions about the fate of the last H. erectus to rest.

但是今天发表在《自然》杂志上的一项研究对最后一批直立人的命运提出了疑问。

By dating the surrounding river sediment, rather than the fossils themselves, anthropologists were able to identify a much tighter age range for these skulls. The results showed that the H. erectus individuals perished in a mass death between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago.

通过测定周围河流沉积物的年代，而不是化石本身，人类学家能够确定这些头骨更小的年龄范围。结果表明，直立人在11.7万至10.8万年前的一次大规模死亡中死亡。

That means the bones represent the last known appearance of H. erectus in the archaeological record.

这意味着这些骨头代表了考古学记录中已知的最后一次直立人的出现。

The new timeline helps solve other puzzles as well, since it enables anthropologists to identify other ancient human species that H. erectus overlapped with – and those it didn't.

新的时间轴也有助于解决其他难题，因为它使人类学家能够确定其他与直立人有重叠的远古人类物种，以及那些没有重叠的。