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  3. PASSAGE THREE (1) Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the form

PASSAGE THREE (1) Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the form

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问题 PASSAGE THREE
(1)  Vast stretches of central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over the southern part of the former Soviet Union and there are long moments when no town or road or field is visible from your window. The landscape of stark desert, trackless steppe (大草原) , and rugged mountains seems to swallow up anything human.  It is little surprise, then, that this region remains largely unknown to most archaeologists.
(2)  Wandering bands and tribes roamed this immense area for 5,000 years, herding goat, sheep, cattle, and horses across immense steppes, through narrow valleys, and over high snowy passes. They left occasional tombs that survived the ages, and on rare occasions settled down and built towns or even cities. But for the most part, these peoples left behind few physical traces of their origins, beliefs, or ways of life. What we know of these nomadic pastoralists comes mainly from their periodic forays into India, the Middle East, and China, where they often wreaked havoc and earned a fearsome reputation as enemies of urban life.
(3)  In the past century, scholars criticized these people as destructive, dismissed them as marginal, or, at best, cast them as a harsh tonic for restoring vigor to decaying and soft agricultural societies from ancient Mesopotamia to Imperial Rome to Han China. In the 1950’s, a British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler blamed the aggressive, chariot-driving Aryans who swept in from the steppes for the demise of the peaceful Indus River civilization after 1800 B.C., though later archaeologists dismissed that claim.
(4)  But Michael Frachetti, a young archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, takes the radical view that Central Asians were early midwives in the birth of civilization rather than a destructive force. Frachetti argues that ancient pastoralists living in the third millennium B.C., at the time of the first great cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus, created a network stretching across thousands of miles that passed along goods, technologies, and ideas central to urban life. He believes they helped create civilization rather than hindering it.
(5)  Most archaeological work in Central Asia during the past century has focused on the open and rolling plains that stretch from the Black Sea to Manchuria. These steppes only came to life after 2000 B.C., when horse domestication and riding suddenly turned a forbidding landscape for pedestrians into a natural highway of grass.
(6)  By contrast, the areas to the south of the steppes have long been dismissed as backwaters of history. In the past, these southern mountains and deserts were considered too remote, rugged, and inhospitable to have played a role in early migrations or the emergence of urban life. The Karakum Desert, where it might rain once in a decade, covers nearly two-thirds of today’s Turkmenistan, while the perpetually snow-covered Tian Shan Mountains of western China and eastern Kyrgyzstan soar 24,000 feet into the thin air. It is there that Frachetti and a new generation of archaeologists from the United States and Central Asian nations are discovering evidence of a network of pastoralists who thrived centuries before hooves resounded on the steppes to the north. These forgotten peoples may have carried such markers of civilization as ceramics and grains across thousands of miles, two millennia before the Silk Road linked the Roman Empire with Han China. Frachetti argues that the new data emerging from the region force archaeologists to rethink their ideas about trade across Eurasia during the Bronze Age, when the first civilizations were taking form to the east, south, and west.
(7)  Frachetti, who has studied modern-day pastoralists in such unforgiving landscapes as the Sahara and Scandinavia, was drawn to the southern region of Central Asia for its environmental diversity of desert, grassland, and meadows. Instead of a wasteland, he saw an ideal landscape for enterprising herders who wanted to pasture their animals in all seasons. Together with his colleagues, Frachetti began digging a decade ago in the Dzhungar Mountains of Kazakhstan. Covering nearly 500 square miles, this region lies between the Tian Shan and Altai mountain ranges, and boasts sharp peaks topping 12,000 feet, as well as harsh desert. At a site near a village called Begash, on a flat terrace enclosed by steep canyon walls alongside a small stream, the team uncovered the foundations of simple stone structures along with an array of potsherds (陶瓷碎片) and bronze and stone artifacts in stone-lined oval and rectangular tombs. The earliest layers at Begash date to at least as early as 2500 B. C. , based on alpha magnetic spectrometry dating of organic remains, says Frachetti. One woman was laid to rest with a bell-shaped hooked bronze earring around 1700 B.C., according to electron spin resonance dating. Similar earrings are only found several centuries later some 600 miles to the north on the Siberian steppes, hinting at styles that moved north over time.
(8)  More surprisingly, the excavators found wheat, which was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and broomcorn millet that was first widely grown in northern China. The grains were used ritually in a burial, and radiocarbon dating of the remains dates them to about 2200 B.C., making them the oldest known domesticated grains in Central Asia. The people of Begash may not have grown either grain—there are no grinding stones, a sign of grain preparation—but instead received it via trade networks stretching from the Near East to China.
(9)  Dorian Fuller, a leading expert in ancient grains based at University College London, calls the finds " important and well dated. " He adds that Chinese crops such as millet began to appear in southwest Asia around 1900 B. C. , a few centuries after they reached Begash, which could mean the passage through the mountain regions was a means of gradual transmission from east to west. Frachetti speculates that the grains may have been acquired from other tribes and used for ritual purposes, and then perhaps were passed on in turn to other pastoral peoples.
(10)  What makes the Begash discoveries so important is that previously this region was assumed to have been a land of scattered foragers (狩猎者) until steppe peoples trickled down into the area’s valleys and mountain ranges after 2000 B. C. But it is becoming evident that the people of Begash were not simple foragers, but sophisticated pastoralists who tended their flocks, much as people in the area still do today. The inhabitants did not begin to use horses until well into the second millennium B.C., and the varieties of sheep and goat found here today appear to be related to the varieties first domesticated thousands of years before in western Iran, near ancient Mesopotamia. This indicates that Begash was " at the crossroads of extremely wide networks among Eurasian communities by the third millennium B.C.," asserts Frachetti. That doesn’t mean that traders traversed thousands of miles in this early period. Instead, the archaeologist envisions pastoralists taking their flocks to higher pastures in the summer, where they encountered neighbors from other valleys doing the same. Thus, ideas and technologies might have passed gradually through the mountain corridors of southern Central Asia. This corridor, Frachetti believes, may have been a key conduit for Bronze Age developments farther into East Asia and Mongolia.
According to the passage, what made the steppes accessible to travelers?
选项
答案A
解析 事实细节题。根据题于中的关键词the steppes定位至第五段。该段最后一句提到，这些草原直到公元前2000年后才焕发生机，原因是当时人们驯化了马，因而可以骑乘马匹，而在此之前，这个地方难以穿越，令徒步者望而却步，故A为答案。原文中没有提到人口的迁徙或气候是否发生变化，故排除C和D；上文提到这些游牧民族极少定居和建立城镇，故排除B。
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