The First Galaxies and the Likely Discovery of their Fossils in the
  Local Group
  In cold dark matter cosmologies, small mass halos outnumber larger mass halos
at any redshift. However, the lower bound for the mass of a galaxy is unknown,
as are the typical luminosity of the smallest galaxies and their numbers in the
universe. The answers depend on the extent to which star formation in the first
population of small mass halos may be suppressed by radiative feedback loops
operating over cosmological distance scales. If early populations of dwarf
galaxies did form in significant number, their relics should be found today in
the Local Group. These relics have been termed "fossils of the first galaxies".
This paper is a review that summarizes our ongoing efforts to simulate and
identify these fossils around the Milky Way and Andromeda.
  It is widely believed that reionization of the intergalactic medium would
have stopped star formation in the fossils of the first galaxies. Thus, they
should be among the oldest objects in the Universe. However, here we dispute
this idea and discuss a physical mechanism whereby relatively recent episodes
of gas accretion and star formation would be produced in some fossils of the
first galaxies. We argue that fossils may be characterized either by a single
old population of stars or by a bimodal star formation history. We also propose
that the same mechanism could turn small mass dark halos formed before
reionization into gas-rich but starless "dark galaxies".
  We believe that current observational data support the thesis that a fraction
of the new ultra-faint dwarfs recently discovered in the Local Group are in
fact fossils of the first galaxies.
