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1111 days ago
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 saga s— legend s handed down from one generation of story-tellers to another. These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migration s of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did. Anthropologist s wondered where the remote ancestor s 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. But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologist s have neither history nor legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from. Fortunately, however, ...
