[ti:未知]
[00:02.98]Lesson 1
[00:04.66]  Finding fossil man
[00:12.18]Why are legends handed down by storytellers useful?
[00:19.47]We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East,
[00:24.91]where people first learned to write.
[00:28.14]But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write.
[00:34.00]The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas
[00:41.10]--legends handed down from one generation of storytellers to another.
[00:47.43]These legends are useful
[00:49.88]because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago,
[00:56.34]but none could write down what they did.
[01:00.77]Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples
[01:06.49]now living in the Pacific Islands
[01:08.67]came from.
[01:10.60]The sagas of these people explain
[01:12.91]that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago.
[01:19.46]But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago
[01:24.20]that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten.
[01:29.32]So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out
[01:34.86]where the first 'modern men' came from
[01:39.15]Fortunately,however,ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint,
[01:45.69]because this is easier to shape than other kinds.
[01:50.22]They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away.
[01:56.45]Stone does not decay,and so the tools of long ago have remained
[02:03.25]when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.