  I will focus on the study of the Cosmic Dark ages and in particular on the
properties of the galaxies responsible for the reionization of Hydrogen and on
the possibility of detecting the first generation of galaxies and the first
stars. I will make the case that there is a large and widening gap between our
present and future capabilities in imaging and what we can follow-up
spectroscopically even with the NIRSpec spectrograph on the James Webb Space
Telescope because of its moderate field of view. A high throughput, high
multiplexing near-IR spectrometer on the Extremely Large Telescope would be
important to contain this gap. Studying the Lyman alpha forest of QSOs at z>=7
and measuring the kinematics of small mass galaxies at high-z are also problems
unsuited to JWST and where a high-throughput, medium-high resolution near-IR
spectrograph on the ELT would be essential.
