Lesson 1 Finding fossil man (化石人) 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 word where even now people cannot write
The only way that they can preserve (baocun) their history is to recount (叙述) it as sagas (传奇) -- legends handed down from one generation of another
These legends are useful because they can tell us something about migrations (移民) of people who lived long ago, but none could write down what they did
Anthropologists (人类学者) 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 (印尼) about 2,000 years ago
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so
