We can read of things that 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 they 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 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 'modern 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 not decay, and so the tools
of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have
disappeared without trace.&