How We Know What Happened Long Ago

Long, long ago, before your grandma's grandma was born, a hunter in a cave painted a picture of a horse on a wall in France. That painting is still there today — it is about 17,000 years old! No one wrote down a story about that hunter. So how do we know the painting is real, and how old it is? Historians are like detectives who search for clues.

- What a historian actually does - Three kinds of clues that tell us about the past: objects, writing, and stories passed down by families - Why old objects in museums are treated so carefully - How to be a "clue detective" about your own family's history

Old pots, coins, toys, and tools are called artifacts. In Egypt, workers found a boy king's tomb in 1922. His name was Tutankhamun, and he was only 9 years old when he became king. Inside his tomb were gold masks, chairs, and even board games — all more than 3,000 years old! Each object told historians something: the games showed how kids played, and the gold showed he was very important.

Some of the oldest writing in the world was pressed into wet clay by people in Sumer (in what is now Iraq) about 5,000 years ago. They used a stick to make little wedge shapes. This writing is called cuneiform. It was often used to count sheep and grain — even ancient people needed to keep track of their stuff!

Not every culture wrote things down. Many peoples, like the Griots of West Africa, told history through spoken stories and songs passed from parent to child for hundreds of years. A single Griot could memorize the names of kings going back 800 years! Historians now write down these spoken histories so they are never lost.