[al:新概念英语（四）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（英音）] [ti:Finding Fossil Man] [by:更多学习内容，请到chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [00:01.43]Lesson 1 [00:03.10]Finding fossil man [00:11.93]Why are legends handed down by storytellers useful? [00:18.45]We can read of things that happened 5,000 years ago in the Near East, [00:24.09]where people first learned to write. [00:27.20]But there are some parts of the world where even now people cannot write. [00:33.18]The only way that they can preserve their history is to recount it as sagas [00:40.27]legends handed down from one generation of storytellers to another. [00:46.80]These legends are useful [00:49.21]because they can tell us something about migrations of people who lived long ago, [00:55.74]but none could write down what they did. [01:00.35]Anthropologists wondered where the remote ancestors of the Polynesian peoples [01:06.01]now living in the Pacific Island scame from. [01:10.03]The sagas of these people explain [01:12.81]that some of them came from Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. [01:19.04]But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago [01:23.99]that even their sagas,if they had any,are forgotten. [01:28.97]So archaeologists have neither history nor legends to help them to find out [01:34.68]where the first 'modern men' came from. [01:38.90]Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone,especially flint, [01:45.48]because this is easier to shape than other kinds. [01:50.14]They may also have used wood and skins,but these have rotted away. [01:56.46]Stone does not decay, [01:59.22]and so the tools of long ago have remained [02:02.56]when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.