Lesson 1 Finding Fossil man
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 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
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.