We can reads of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learn to
write. But there are some parts of the word where even now people can not write. The only way that
they can preserve their history is to recount it as sages- 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 ancesters of the Polynesian people now living in the Pacific insland
came from. The sagas of these people explain 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 'mordern men' came from.
Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, because this is easier to
shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away. Stone
does mot decay, and so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made
them have disappeared without trace.