We can read of things that happened 5000 years ago in the NearEast, where people first learned to write. But there are some parts of the world, where even not people cannot write. The only way they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas--legends handed down from one generation of story tellers 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 people now living in the Pacific Islands came from. The sagas of these people explain that some of them came form Indonesia about 2000 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 find out where the first modern man 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 doesn't decay. And so the tools of long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disppeared without trace.
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