[00:00.49]We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, where people first learned to write.
[00:08.65]But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.
[00:13.88]The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas -- legends handed down from one generation of story tales to another.
[00:26.17]These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,
[00:34.97]but none could write down what they did.
[00:38.69]Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples now living in the Pacific Islands came from.
[00:47.68]The sagas of these people explain that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
[00:55.67]But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas,if they had any, are forgotten.
[01:05.06]So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.
[01:13.98]Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint,
[01:20.63]because this is easier to shape than other kinds.
[01:24.78]They may also have used wood and skins, but these have rotted away.
[01:30.66]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.
