Lesson 1
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.
But the first people who were like ourselves lived so long ago that even their
sagas, if they had any, are forgotten. So archaeologists have neither history nor
legends to help them to find out where the first 'modern men' came from.
Fortunately, however, ancient men made tools of stone, especially flint, be-
cause this is easier to shape than other kinds. They may also have used wood
and skins, but these have rotted away. Stone does not decay, and so the tools of
long ago have remained when even the bones of the men who made them have disappeared without trace.
In the Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently of people who
can read and detect colours with their fingers, and even see through solid doors
and walls. One case concerns an 'eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Vera Petrova, who
has normal vision but who can also perceive things with different parts of her
skin, and through solid walls. This ability was first noticed by her father. One
day she came into his office and happened to put her hands on the door of a
locked safe. Suddenly she asked her father why he kept so many old newspapers
locked away there, and even described the way they were done up in bundles.
Vera's curious talent was brought to the notice of a scientific research institute
in the town of UIyanovsk, near where she lives, and in April she was given a
series of tests by a special commission of the Ministry of Health of the Russian
Federal Republic. During these tests she was able to read a newspaper through
an opaque screen and, stranger still, by moving her elbow over a child's game of
Lotto she was able to describe the figures and colours printed on it; and, in an-
other instance, wearing stockings and slippers, to make out with her foot the
outlines and colours of a picture hidden under a carpet. Other experiments
showed that her knees and shoulders had a similar sensitivity. During all these
tests Vera was blindfold; and, indeed, except when blindfold she lacked the
ability to perceive things with her skin. lt was also found that although she
could perceive things with her fingers this ability ceased the moment her hands
were wet.