Abstract: The most metal-poor stars we find in the Milky Way today were born in pristine environments in the early Universe — these stars are expected to be extremely old. They can teach us about the First Stars and about the early formation and evolution of our Galaxy. In this talk I will focus on two groups of ancient stars: very metal-poor stars with exceptionally high carbon abundances (CEMP stars), which are probes of the nucleosynthesis in the First Stars and binary interactions, and the most metal-poor stars in the inner regions of the Milky Way. The fraction of metal-poor stars which are very old is expected to be very high in the Galactic bulge region. However, searching for metal-poor stars there faces many challenges, hence much is unknown about the properties of the metal-poor inner Galaxy. I will introduce the Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS) which has reached unprecedented efficiency in finding very metal-poor stars in the Galactic bulge region. I will present recent PIGS results on the chemistry and the kinematics of metal-poor inner Galaxy stars, and discuss what they can teach us about this ancient component of the Milky Way.