[00:01.43]Lesson 1
[00:03.10]Finding fossil man
[00:11.93]Why are legends handed down by storytellers useful?
[00:18.45]We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East,
[00:24.09]where people first learned to write.
[00:27.20]But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.
[00:33.18]The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas
[00:40.27]legends handed down from one generation of storytellers to another.
[00:46.80]These legends are useful
[00:49.21]because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,
[00:55.74]but none could write down what they did.
[01:00.35]Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples
[01:06.01]now living in the Pacific Island scame from.
[01:10.03]The sagas of these people explain
[01:12.81]that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
[01:19.04]But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago
[01:23.99]that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.
[01:28.97]So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out
[01:34.68]where the first 'modern men' came from.
[01:38.90]Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,
[01:45.48]because this is easier to shape than other kinds.
[01:50.14]They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.
[01:56.46]Stone does not decay,
[01:59.22]and so the tools of long ago have remained
[02:02.56]when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.