We can read of things happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned
to write. But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. The
only way that can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas-legends handed down from
one generation of storytellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us
something about migrations of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what
they did. Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now
living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explains that some of them
came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if
they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them
to find out where the first 'modernmen' came from.
Fortunately, however, ancient mem made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is
easier to shape than other kinds. They may have used wood and skins, but these have rotted
away. Stone does not dacay, and so the tools of long age have remained when even the bones
of the man who made them have disappeared without trace.